tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-343265732015-03-30T07:08:56.925+00:00No Good BoyoY gŵr yn erbyn y bydNo Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.comBlogger232125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-9282806907296022562014-01-08T09:27:00.000+00:002014-01-08T09:27:15.627+00:00Pictures of Our Dark Lord That Look Like The K-Man (Part I)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a9q-BLPrVhY/Us0Z1TKb_QI/AAAAAAAAA4g/54MCGCmhQmM/s1600/lewis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a9q-BLPrVhY/Us0Z1TKb_QI/AAAAAAAAA4g/54MCGCmhQmM/s1600/lewis.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></div><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-61573286854276867572013-12-31T21:44:00.001+00:002013-12-31T21:44:30.546+00:00Song at the ear's turning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jO1GMtzcwZU/UsM4kw4XGaI/AAAAAAAAA4Q/m6Su1cEsoac/s1600/pint.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jO1GMtzcwZU/UsM4kw4XGaI/AAAAAAAAA4Q/m6Su1cEsoac/s1600/pint.jpg" /></a></div>It was the Feast of St Trisant, the patron of Welsh rustlers, and I was celebrating down The Tethered Goat with a few honoured guests of our guild. Ron the Barman happened to be marking the 60th anniversary of his desertion from the Essex Irregulars - <i>"Told me to stop shooting Dutchmen, so I legged it and carried on. Got a medal from someone - not sure who"</i> - and was topping our pints of Champion's Freckled Johnson with belts of blue curaçao <i>"for the Royal baby"</i>. Spirits and hemlines rode high as talk turned to New Year resolutions.<br /><br />These midwinter pieties, much like careers and amorous rebuffs, simply don't occur to Welshmen, who preach the perennial pattern of <i>"live slow, drink long, and leave someone else's corpse"</i>, but this year I suddenly yearned to make my mark - and not just in a jaundiced snow drift on the way home.<br /><br />The public house is my natural environment, home as it is to dusty sedation, nostalgic odours and bedraggled women, and so here I must make my stand.&nbsp;I looked from companion to companion, and fast realised I would never outdrink the K-Man, outsmoke Dazza, beat The Dog in the <i>"neighbours said he kept himself to himself"</i> stakes or hint at the hedgerow allure of Rock-Chick No.3.<br /><br />Again struck by my essential shallowness, I glanced up at the bar, past Shitty Dave, Maniac Postman and the undercover lager drinkers, and snagged on the <i>Last Year in Marienbad</i> loop that is&nbsp;Nottingham John's motorways-and-marketstalls monologue. <br /><br /><i>"...I telt him once if I telt him a million times not to come off at Tamworth that early, 'cause that's where the coppers patrol in unmarked Subarus..."</i> he ground on at some blameless soak who'd never travelled further than the bookies on anything faster than his polished bunions. <br /><br />And then it dawned on me. This is where I could excel. From my epic apprenticeship as <i>a</i>&nbsp;man in a pub, I could emerge as that master-craftstman of unfounded counsel - <i>the</i> Man In The Pub.<br /><br />Too long has my lady wife had to burrow beagle-like deep into the set of my latest schemes, only to flush out the Bibulous Badger of Saloon Bar Bollocks, heralded as ever by the caveat <i>"well, bloke down the pub said..."</i><br /><br />How proud she'll be, I thought, no longer to have to disabuse, or sometimes simply abuse, me on such matters as whether stamps are legal tender, the Pope controls the European butter mountain, and owls cannot &nbsp;physically be gay. Now it will be me sending husbands home with a fleaful of fibs in the ear.<br /><br />It's not even 2014 yet, and I'm already preparing material for my debut next to the giant whisky bottle full of buttons and pesetas this Friday. Here's an <i>amuse-bouche</i> for you Epicurians of the expendable:<br /><br /><ul><li><i>"If you knock off a policeman's wife while he's on duty, he can't arrest you..."</i></li><li><i>"The Queen lets you off if you eat a swan's wing, but only as long as you did it one-armed. You get a Royal Pardon. That's how they caught that Abu Hamza..."</i></li><li><i>"The mob and Castro killed Marilyn Monroe because they thought JFK was round her place - that and they was worried she'd make another film. Kennedy topped himself in grief, got the CIA to stage it to look like an assassination. Ginger Spice is their daughter, and all..."</i></li><li><i>"Earth's flat, mate - Moon as well. And I can <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/lost-horizon.html">prove it</a>..."</i></li><li><i>"Japanese women, right..."</i></li></ul><br />All of this wisdom can be yours for a pint of Abdication Special and some nuts - proper ones, mind, not them dry-roasted ones. Scientists showed they're made of sweepings, held together with piss and cocaine. On the other hand...<br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-1820480438945623532013-11-21T12:44:00.000+00:002013-11-25T20:19:27.451+00:00Oeil de Faucon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oCTrV-6SBg8/Uo3_wzq5hHI/AAAAAAAAA38/ECgKc57A-bs/s1600/madoc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oCTrV-6SBg8/Uo3_wzq5hHI/AAAAAAAAA38/ECgKc57A-bs/s1600/madoc.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">We've met <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/love-and-human-remains.html">Wislen</a> before, walking a telephonic tightrope between a Toronto <i>Hausfrau</i> and her husband, whose erotic adventures with a Hoover Powerdrive vacuum cleaner had left him in the care of the municipal ambulance service.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">I asked him how he'd honed such diplomatic skills. <i>"I'm a meaty, bearded bear of man with bowed arms and a short fuse,"</i>he explained from under an absurd hat, <i>"And being a Goldwater Republican gives me plenty of scope for practicing patience in this fag-hag country of yours."</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"How come?"</i> I asked.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"Because I come from <st1:city w:st="on">Dallas</st1:city>, and have to sit through under-considered recollections of where people think they were when President Kennedy was shot every goddam week."</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"You didn't like him, then?"</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"I come from <st1:city w:st="on">Dallas</st1:city>,"</i>he repeated evenly.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">I soon had occasion to witness Wislen's subtle social <i>savoir-faire</i> in action on the bracken-buckled battlefield that is <st1:country-region w:st="on">Wales</st1:country-region> - the bar of The Torrent Walk Hotel in my hometown Dolgellau, to be precise.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">Our frontiersman friend had taken the stone-wheeled funicular up from <st1:country-region w:st="on">England</st1:country-region>to visit me one college summer holiday. He enjoyed the journey through the <st1:placename w:st="on">Berwyn</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Mountains</st1:placetype>- <i>"reminds me of my winter wolf-herding round the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Borgo</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Pass</st1:placetype></st1:place>"</i>- and was full of bonhomie as we settled down at an overturned table in the Torrent's dugout bar.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">Three rounds into the barrel of St Trisant's Landsker Special, and Wislen felt expansive enough to wander up to the bar rather than rely on my native disdain for vowels.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">As Chwarthbell the barmaid heaved the hoppy slops into a pair of slate jugs, Wislen lit up the cosy gloom with his American smile. <i>"Know what I like about <st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place>, Boyo?" </i>he bellowed thoughtfully. <i>"Back home I'm not such a tall guy, but - shoot! - I'm a head higher than every peon in this bar!"</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">The guttural chatter of goat-gelding ground down like badly-filed teeth. All was still, save for the rasp of breath over bevelled tongues and the growling gale without.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">Wislen's Texan <i>élan</i> bore him blithely over these breakers of Silurian resentment, although I knew that, even as he arranged his denim rump back on the lacquered tree stump, a phalanx of firebranded fanatics was circling his parents' Panhandle ranch, kindling aloft and coccyges aquiver.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">Wislen quaffed on undaunted. I was about to broach a brace of cultural recommendations, before the hunchbacks by the hearth could finish hawking into the ritual coal-scuttle, when the weighted boulder rolled back and my cousin Wilma shouldered her way in.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">Like so many Welshwomen Wilma craved human company, and so bore down on Wislen, shandy in hand.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">It was the work of moments for her to ascertain that our guest was single, solvent and not from around here, simply by surveying his even number of digits.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"Where you from then?"</i> she whistled through her front row of teeth, primping her ebony bangs with a divining stick.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"These <st1:country-region w:st="on">United States of America</st1:country-region>, ma'am,"</i> he declared.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"Oooh,"</i> she cooed, <i>"whereabouts?"</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"<st1:place w:st="on">Texas</st1:place>."</i>He was as buttoned down as a Brooks Brothers shirt by now.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"Big and bright!"</i> yodelled Wilma, setting off an atavistic chorus of <i>'<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYLPrrZd9EY">Hen Ferchetan</a>'</i> from the council puddle-heating crew dripping proudly in the corner. <i>"And from where in <st1:state w:st="on">Texas</st1:state>? The Salammbô?"</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"I was coming to that."</i> Wislen shrivelled like a jellyfish in the shadow of a seaside shovel. </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"I'm from <st1:city w:st="on">Dallas</st1:city>."</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"Aaaah, I remember where I was when your President Kennedy died!"</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">Now it was Wilma, but it could have been any and every barfly or border guard from <st1:place w:st="on">Dún Laoghaire</st1:place> to Luhansk. </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"Do tell,"</i> whispered Wislen, prodding me towards the heaving kegs.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"Well, I'll never forget that night. Boyo was just a baby, and I was minding him while his parents were out on the town. I was hosing him down after a game of 'cormorant' in the witches' pool when the news came over the wireless - I had to turn up the Bunsen burner to get the valves working right..."</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">There followed a pleasant few hours of explaining that New Mexico is a place in its own right, not simply a more recent version of Mexico, before we waded out into the evening ichor and headed home to our respective huts.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">Wislen lit a <i>Cohiba </i>and generously scattered some <st1:city w:st="on">Chesterfields</st1:city> to the pre-teen tokers at his heels.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><i>"I'm a rye-based, red-eyed lifeform, Boyo,"</i> he ruminated. <i>"And I'm not set on living forever. But I like to hope that one day people will remember my hometown for its extensive marshalling yards and enigmatic underpasses, not just because some Cajun nut done shot one of our many presidents there."</i></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">I suppose I could have said that for most of us <st1:city w:st="on">Dallas</st1:city> already meant amoral oilmen dangling off Sue Ellen's shoulder-pads, rather than the messy dispatch of JFK to the great pool party in the sky. </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">But I was too busy trying to understand how Wilma could have doused me on 22 November 1963 when, according to the squid-ink inscription in the Boyo family Bible, I first swam ashore from our <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Bardsey</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Island</st1:placetype></st1:place>spawning ground some 13 months later. </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText">At least I have the right number of fingers to figure it out. </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoBodyText"><br /></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-86851191518724141882013-02-05T15:46:00.001+00:002013-02-05T15:51:53.285+00:00Thinking of YouFebruary is upon us, like a puppy fished from a <b>frostbound pond, </b>so it is time for me to mark the traditional Welsh New Year.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AQDlW3lcJkc/UQ-Y20Ljo8I/AAAAAAAAA2I/TekAzmaXeqI/s1600/hall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AQDlW3lcJkc/UQ-Y20Ljo8I/AAAAAAAAA2I/TekAzmaXeqI/s1600/hall.jpg" /></a></div>The world of broadcasting pants with gratitude, much like that aforementioned puppy, at the news that <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/25/bbc-director-general-lord-hall">Terry Hall</a> is taking over as director-general of the BBC on 2 April. So that's one <b>PR humiliation </b>missed with barely 24 hours to spare.<br /><br />As always, I have some programme suggestions for him to kick off his tenure with rather more aplomb than was managed by his <b>flourfaced predecessor</b>.<br /><br />The BBC constantly scans modern Britain in all its racial, social, regional and agely diversity for people who think exactly alike, then lets them loose on Question Time to <b>peddle their grievances</b> to three interchangeable politicians and a <i>"comic"</i>.<br /><br />But our national broadcaster is neglecting an important roost of the insulted and injured - <b>the passive-aggressive community</b>. It is the Corporation's duty to prise these pallid pedants out of the Sunday newspaper letters columns and into the spluttering fluorescence of fame.<br /><br />I propose the following nests for their <b>twitching resentments</b>:<br /><br /><i><b>1. "Losers' Dinners". </b></i>(The title is an homage to the late Michael Winner's ill-mannered sampling of a thousand sous-chefs' seed.) Normal people sit down to a country supper, only to find themselves assailed by the mosquito whine of self-obsession.<br /><br /><i>In tonight's episode:</i> <b>Battle of Britain ace </b>Ernest "Belcher" Hogg takes his wife of 60 years out for a feast of pork shoulder, washed down with Alsatian hock.<br /><br />The surrounding tables are occupied by <b>wan Muslim converts</b>, who tut with every forbidden mouthful at why Squadron Leader Hogg had <i>"picked on the Germans instead of doing something about Palestine"</i>.<br /><br /><i><b>2. "No No No!" </b></i>This is a very British take on America's marvellous "<a href="http://www.mst3k.com/">Mystery Science Theater 3000</a>", a programme in which robots from the future jeer at low-grade Sci-Fi films - which means all Sci-Fi film.<br /><br />In my version, <i>eau-de-chat</i> letter-writers with signed photographs of locomotives on their parlour walls sit through BBC period dramas, separated from the television by a <b>Bovril-retardant screen</b>, and squeal the programme name into the dog-whistle register every time someone on <i>"<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wkgxw">The Hour</a>"</i> refers to the Sunday Telegraph (<i>"No No No!&nbsp;It wasn't launched until 1961!!!!"</i>)<br /><br />The season finale will have cardiganned army dreamers bolted into dentists' chairs as they project their dentures at a specially-commissioned Fox documentary - <i><b>"Barnes Wallis: An American Hero"</b></i>.<br /><br /><i><b>3. "RSI: Miami". </b></i>South Florida cops and forensics bods struggle to solve crimes using state-of-the-art technology, good-old-fashioned policing and an array of keyboards, wrist-wraps, lumbar-hugging chairs and height-adjustable desks that appear to have been designed by and for HP Lovecraft's <b>inter-dimensional bestiary</b>.<br /><br /><i>Episode One: </i>There's a crazed killer on the loose, but Lt Caine can't lift his arms above his head - even thought Detective Duquesne needs help with adjusting her support corsetry.<br /><br /><i><b>4. "...Before the Americans Ruin It".&nbsp; </b></i>Now it's true the BBC already packs pairs of faux-teen haircuts off to Cuba and other telegenic tyrannies to prove, through the medium of wobbly cameras, that shiny clothes and infectious music outweigh anything Amnesty International might have to say.<br /><br />But my <b>orthopaedic reboot </b>replaces vloggers in crop-tops with a phalanx of flavour-fleeing suburban vegans, and drops funky Vietnam for North Korea and worse.<br /><br />Tonight, members of <b>Camden Gluten-Intolerance Support</b> are beaten up by café staff within minutes of arrival at Asmara International Airport, Eritrea, and again at the Hotel Roma, the central market, and later at a meeting with the Eritrean Catering Union (great opportunities for a CCTV/smartphone footage mash-up).<br /><br />And then, in a rousing finale, they are given a good hoofing by their hosts at the Eritrean Vegetarian Society, before being escorted to the <b>vibrant, colourful frontline </b>with Ethiopia.<br /><br />Press the red button on your TV control now to <b>alert the border guards</b>.<br /><br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-86470909854434493672012-12-28T03:04:00.000+00:002012-12-30T08:44:00.700+00:00In Winos Veritas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PJIUD_bBSf4/UN0LqSysJBI/AAAAAAAAA1w/v-baPThBXkw/s1600/gosha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PJIUD_bBSf4/UN0LqSysJBI/AAAAAAAAA1w/v-baPThBXkw/s1600/gosha.jpg" /></a></div>The Mighty Norman Tebbit once compared our prime minister, Mr Cameron, to Pol Pot, <i>quondam</i> leader of the gangster element in the <b>Khmer Rouge</b>. Now even I thought Lord Norman had allowed his rhetoric off the leash on this occasion, as Dave and Pol seem to have little in common apart from cherubic looks and good connections at Court.<br /><br />But the Chingford Cassandra has proved me wrong again, as the Coalition's proposal to increase the minimum price on booze is a measure straight out of the <b>Bumper Book of Bolshevist Blunders</b>.<br /><br />I spent a year in the Soviet Union&nbsp;developing a humble appreciation of market mechanisms&nbsp;as the hapless Mr Gorbachev launched his reform programme in the manner of the <b>Isle of Wight ferry</b> - in reverse order and a miasma of hot air.<br /><br />It's easy to mock <i>glasnost</i> nowadays, given its Fabian faith in patience and cooperation, but any attempt at marrying neo-Stalinism with a Quaker sensibility was going to provide&nbsp;piquant entertainment&nbsp;at the very least&nbsp;for the <b>heartless voyeur</b> with a British passport and return ticket.<br /><br />Sage <b>entrail analysts</b> have long pondered the reasons for Gorbachev's failure. Did he promote political reform at the expense of living standards? Did he send mixed signals to liberals and conservatives alike? Was the Soviet model too atrophied to cope with even minor change?<br /><br />All interesting, all wrong, for I knew <i>perestroika </i>was doomed on 16 May 1985 - the day the Kremlin hiked the <b>price of booze</b>.<br /><br />The aim was to discourage the <b>virtuoso drinking</b> that passed for Soviet recreation, apart from the allied art of random procreation. In the absence of any decent television or many Jews to persecute, that left only football to keep the Russian punter happy.<br /><br />Then Denmark beat the Soviet squad in the <b>World Cup qualifier</b>, and that was that for <i>perestroika</i>.<br /><br />The price rise, coupled with restrictions on where and when you could buy vodka, beer and the Soviet equivalent of wine, was meant to turn the Great Russian Public into sober connoisseurs of didactic literature, <b>fossilised ballet</b> and slow-moving epic cinema.<br /><br />The predictable result was a run on alternative sources of alcohol, in particular boot polish, flight fuel and the&nbsp;<i>"Natasha"</i> brand of perfume. This led in logical sequence to the collapse of the Soviet Army, Air Force and <b>feminine hygiene</b>, in so far as anyone noticed.<br /><br />My Soviet room-mates Kolya and Seriozha would rarely venture far from their encrusted cots without a splash of aftershave around the chops and tonsils, just to keep them topped up until Sergei Kartoshka (Serge the Spud) returned from his collective farm some metres below the village of Kozloyobsk with several demijohns of finest <b>King Edward Red-Eye</b>.<br /><br />If they made it out onto Friedrich Engels St at all, they would slick a couple of <i>poltinniks</i> into the <b>green and furred paw</b> of a mathematics student to sign them in on their Dialectical Materialism Theory Class before joining the two-hour queue for a bottle of flat lager outside State Gastronomic Emporium No.13 In The Name Of Mikhail Suslov.<br /><br />With good timing and the serendipitous demise of pensioners and invalids further up the queue, they might be able to down a couple of intestine-pounding Zhiguli Lites and still make it for an impromptu interrogation course at the Rosa Luxemburg Nurses Hostel, only pausing to <b>void themselves </b>in an Afghan postgraduate's &nbsp;hat.<br /><br />Russians back in 1985 cherished two&nbsp;aspects of Soviet life that made Stalin, plastic shoes and exploding television sets all seem vaguely worthwhile, and these were the Red Army's <b>Wurst-bursting victory</b> over the Germans in the Second World War and the way Scientific Socialism let the Ivans lord it over shifty Tartar types and the thoroughly suspect natives of the Caucasus.<br /><br />Mr Gorbachev, with the unerring step of a deluded somnambulist clambering into a <b>wolf enclosure</b>, then trampled over this remaining pair of patriotic pluses in his soggy bedroom slippers:<br /><br /><b><i>1.</i></b>&nbsp;Instead of jeering at the Armenians' alleged addiction to <b>propositioning poultry</b>, Russians now had to hand over two weeks' salary to Chechen taxi drivers for a still-fermenting bottle of Uzbek brandy and look suitably grateful into the bargain.<br /><br />Prohibition is also how local crime really got organised, so that it was flush enough in the <b>post-Soviet shambles</b> to buy up all of Russia's steel mills and our (association) football teams.<br /><br />Mass racketeering and English public schools plump with <b>Rolexed Muscovite brats</b> had never featured among &nbsp;Gorbachev's agenda points at the XXVIIth Party Congress, at least not according to the banner I'd ended up carrying in the Revolution Day parade that year.<br /><br /><b><i>2. </i></b>Russian war films pre-Gorbachev were refreshingly <b>free of qualms </b>or any factual plotting in a way that Hollywood accounts of the same conflict can only dream of.<br /><br />Hulking straw-haired lathe-grinders, goat-bolters, schoolgirls and progressive livestock would swing as one from the wholesome task of stuffing Siberia-bound trains with Polish schoolteachers, don dashing khaki tunics and pave their rapid path to Berlin with the skulls of&nbsp;<b>cloddish Ukrainian collaborators</b>.<br /><br />The <b>live skulls</b> of&nbsp;cloddish Ukrainian collaborators.<br /><br />The Germans were always skinny degenerates in sagging, sallow uniforms. High Period Soviet war films (1945-1956) would not even inflict the <b>objectively Fascist German language</b> on the gnawed and noble ears of the Great Russian People, insisting instead that actors should communicate in guttural yelps the sort of which Dr Moreau would have despaired.<br /><br />So, no matter how grim their turnip-fuelled economy might be, the Russians could always seek solace in the prospect of the Germans still bartering their teeth for kindling in the <b>owl-haunted ruins</b> of Nuremberg.<br /><br />They were therefore unimpressed to discover, through the magic of <i>glasnost</i> on their tellies, that Germans ate <b>heroic sausages </b>in dappled market squares, strolled around in clothes made of cloth, and had better uses for garter bands than as surrogate fan-belts for their space-age, four-wheeled cars.<br /><br />And they did all of this while drinking <b>foaming lager</b> - yes, Germans can get lager to foam - from mighty glass buckets, delivered to their heaving tables six at a time by hearty farmgirls who'd lost the ability to fasten their blouses.<br /><br />Suddenly, <b>Stalingrad</b> didn't seem such a bargain after all.<br /><br />One morning I had joined Kolya and Seriozha for a <i>troika</i> - we each had three roubles, which was enough to buy the cheapest bottle of vodka. It was some special occasion - Seriozha had <b>washed his neck</b>, I remember that - so we'd decided to spend two hours in the booze queue.<br /><br />After about 50 minutes of our smoking, muttering and round-corner hawking, a pensioner in the standard-issue <b>damp brown flares</b>, pigeon-daubed beret and cardboard jacket marched up, his medals for driving a tank over a pile of Romanian hussars glinting in the low winter sun.<br /><br /><i>"Out of my way, slackers!"</i> he snarled, brandishing his get-out-of-queues-free war veteran card as he shoved through the steaming mob at the shop door. <i>"I was in Berlin, so move it!"</i><br /><br />He'd served in the Red Army, he'd used the palace at Sans Souci as his lavatory, and he'd lived for forty years on <b>birch&nbsp;bark and bitterness</b>. The crowd would have been instinctively sympathetic to him, having at least one such Spartan each in their families. But along came Gorbachev and his Dry Law, and everything was changed, changed utterly.<br /><br />He emerged from the shop clutching two open bottles of Zhiguli. He necked half of one right in front of us, retched, then spat it out over an <b>audience of sparrows</b>.<br /><br /><i>"Pisswater!"</i> he gagged. <i>"To think I fought the Germans for five years - one of them on my own - so that I could drink this muck. Bollocks!"</i><br /><br />Pisswater or not, it was more beer than the rest of us had, and the mood of the crowd was restless. Then one voice rang out:<br /><br /><i>"Think - if you hadn't fought so hard, grandad, we'd all be drinking <b>Bavarian Pils </b>right now!"</i><br /><br />I braced myself for the <b>inevitable lynching</b>. No one in the Soviet Union joked about the Nazis' winning the war.<br /><br />But instead there were a murmur of appreciation, then laughter and a brief round of applause. The <b>Hammer of the Goths</b> shuffled off, trailing his bottles behind him. Mr Gorbachev and Soviet power followed suit, six short years later, to be replaced by the ever-thirsty Boris Yeltsin.<br /><br />Perhaps Mr Cameron should put his feet up on Mr Clegg one evening and ponder these lessons of history. Ed Miliband may be a Diet Coke kinda guy, but out there in the heaving darkness you can just make out the embers of <b>Ken Clarke's cheroot</b>.<br /><br /><br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-18812521987988230142012-11-24T09:42:00.002+00:002012-12-01T10:53:08.877+00:00Scott of Arabia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KwF9aYvkm24/ULCWD8q5TtI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/1Uhw-g49ri0/s1600/tea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KwF9aYvkm24/ULCWD8q5TtI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/1Uhw-g49ri0/s320/tea.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>My forthcoming novel:</i><br /><br />A mix-up at Thomas Cook finds Capt Robert Falcon Scott and his chums deposited on the shores of Arabia Deserta.<br /><br />Undeterred by blistering heat, expiring huskies and the constant chafing of sand under their thermals, the men of the&nbsp;Terra Nova Expedition&nbsp;trudge off,&nbsp;Aqaba-bound, shod in tennis rackets and furs.<br /><br />With foul pipes clenched in sunbleached teeth, they drag sleds of fermenting pemmican and donkey corpses&nbsp;across the Devil's Anvil.<br /><br />Salvador Dalí, a young Catalan artist diverted from Tangiers by a Cox &amp; King's clerk with a loathing for Modernism, strokes the unshaven half of his chin thoughtfully, and pens a <i>pneumatique</i> in betel juice to Luis Buñuel.<br /><br />But, as Scott approaches the Red Sea to turn the Turkish guns, he sees a Norwegian flag fluttering above the Mameluke fort...<br /><br />Meanwhile, a North German Lloyd cruise ship debouches etiolated Welsh invert Capt T.E. Lawrence near Ross Island, Antarctica.<br /><br />His white robes billow in merciless squalls while he pitches a tent of sheer muslin. Lawrence squints into the ebbing Sun. His etchings and easel fly out across McMurdo Sound.<br /><br /><i>"I shall name this frigid landfall Cape Dahoum..."</i> he apostrophises an iceberg, just as an orca describes a perfect arc through the inky skies and snaps his head off.<br /><br />Lawrence's body teeters on the marbled strand for a moment, before toppling into the deep.<br /><br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-35236019598890450302012-11-12T12:04:00.005+00:002012-11-12T12:10:31.572+00:00Integrae servandae<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OIHy14TtiZg/UKDOtGaNkVI/AAAAAAAAA1E/ZMmhuCKTJRk/s1600/moomin.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OIHy14TtiZg/UKDOtGaNkVI/AAAAAAAAA1E/ZMmhuCKTJRk/s1600/moomin.jpeg" /></a></div>BBC types, like Eastenders, the panda-eyed weatherman in Groundhog Day and <b>wrong-trousered Alpine symphonist</b> Anton Bruckner, wake up every day and make the same mistake, as <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ross-brand-guildenstern.html">I've noted before</a>.<br /><br />They derided my advice over Brand, Ross &amp; Sachs - who really should be a firm of <b>Borders solicitors specialising in sheep-rustling</b> - and spurned it over Savile.<br /><br />In the hope that they might listen this time, I'm suggesting that they should grovel to the Tories <b>gangbang-style </b>by handing over their news output to The Royal Horticultural Society, broadcasting proper war films all day on BBC4, and launching the following right-thinking programmes elsewhere:<br /><br /><i><b>Police, Camera, Traction!</b></i><br /><br /><i>BBC3: </i>Warning from History Jim Davidson comments wryly on webcam footage of minor villains being helped down the back stairs of Britain's busiest police stations, then takes some <b>ratepayers and mental patients </b>round to visit them in hospital. <br /><br /><br /><i><b>Moominsummer Murders</b></i><br /><br /><i>CBBC: </i>Inspector Hemulen and Det Sgt Groke drive around Moominvalley in a vintage motor, eating berries and <b>scattering Snork Maidens</b> like petals.<br /><br /><i>Episode 1: </i>Mrs Fillyjonk is found impaled on her own broomstick. Hemulen and Groke <b>supercharge some Hattifatteners</b> and lie in wait in the Lonely Mountains until springtime, for Romany rover and therefore prime suspect Snufkin to come rambling through. &nbsp; <br /><br /><i><b>I'm a Celebrity, Get It Out Of Me! </b></i><br /><br /><i>BBC1 &amp; Interactive:</i> Viewers with shires phone numbers select dyed women and men with piercings from off the telly, who are then literally carted off to Clun for the recently relegalised <b>Marches Eel Festival</b>.<br /><br />Revenue raised from DVD and programming sales worldwide will more than cover the <b>inevitable legal fees</b>, and <i>Newsnight</i> and <i>Panorama</i> can spend all year investigating leaks of the uncut footage onto the Internet.<br /><br /><i>Next! </i>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-48539011817315031322012-10-02T11:11:00.000+00:002012-10-02T11:11:00.543+00:00We'll Keep a Whetstone in the Hillsides<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-k2oxXmjiggE/UFkcTbN2DOI/AAAAAAAAA0E/Aq2rH1oxCtg/s1600/loughville.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-k2oxXmjiggE/UFkcTbN2DOI/AAAAAAAAA0E/Aq2rH1oxCtg/s1600/loughville.jpg" /></a></div>We met beneath the pigeons at Reading Railway Station - Sioba Siencyn, Iago Anffawd and I. We paused, for the <b>Spirit of the Sesh</b> had descended upon us. Far from silently, we set off for the <i>"Яevolution"</i> bar on Station Rd to commune with our profound Cambritude.<br /><br />Subterreanean lakes of ale were siphoned through our slate-slaked systems as we laboured on the screenplay for a Welsh James Bond film. Little survived of my notes the following day, apart from <b>"HELENA BONHAM CARTER - LESBIUN!"</b> scrawled on my forearm in <i>Żubrówka</i>.<br /><br />But I do recall a scene in which we imagined the childhood trauma that warped the Welsh Bond into working for MI6. Being abandoned in a slate quarry by <b>troglodyte parents</b> would be one:<br /><br /><i>[Dark interior of the Llechwedd Slate Mine, Blaenau Ffestiniog. A small boy in grey flannel shorts, blazer and cap stands alone, holding a gently deflating balloon. A canary perched on crag provides the sole splash of colour as water drips hollow from the walls] </i><br /><i><br /></i><i>Boy [plaintively]: "Mam!"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>[The canary falls dead at his feet]</i><br /><br />Siencyn and I knew Blaenau well. He, a southerner from sunny Llanishen, had been scared sobbing to his brackish bed by tales of the <i>Bwgan Blaenau</i> - a <b>trouserless quarryman</b> who sharpened insolent children into bradawls for the splitting of the slate.<br /><br />I had often peer through the clouds crowding over far Ffestiniog and thanked <i>Hendwrch</i>, the <b>Badger God of Unforeseen Coupling</b>, that I was a native of neighbouring Dolgellau.<br /><br />But Iago was different. Like his native Swansea, he burned with the brio of sodium in a swimming pool - fast and fierce, but warm and always watchable. He decided that we were brandishing the Welsh-speaker's <b>sawn-off sense of humour</b> in Blaenau's general direction, thinking that we complain and denigrate solely to indulge and exalt.<br /><br />For one of the few occasions in the history of our <b>crab-clawed country</b> we were in fact being totally and utterly honest&nbsp; - a word that did not even exist in Welsh until we filched it from the French. That's right, from the French. Iago trusted in our duplicity, and we let him down.<br /><br />Even the all-embracing National Park shuns Blaenau. A <b>sooty enclave</b> within the painted playground of Snowdownia, it has few links to the sunlit lowlands beyond a steam railway and the unicycle path over the Crimea Pass hewn by circus fugitives.<br /><br />Blaenau is industry's vision of that <b>disembowelled baboon</b> in Cronenberg's <i>"The Fly"</i>. It is Wales's last revolt against progress, and a warning to the curious geologist.<br /><br />A few weeks later Siencyn and I were relaxing with some <b>mushroom flummery</b> among the oak garlands of our living room, when the telephone rang. We stared it for a while. Siencyn picked up Pshîla the cat and pressed what he thought was re-dial before I found the receiver and yelled a greeting over the cacaphonous Celtic <i>Katzenjammer</i>.<br /><br /><i>"It's me Iago, mun!"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"Arright Iargs, where are you? Pshîla's got Siencyn in a five-point pindown and the <b>nettle brandy</b>'s taking the edge off my evening. so why don't you pop round? Bring the missus."</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"Can't. We're both in bloody Blaenau Ffefuckingstingiog."</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"?!"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"Second honeymoon. Surprise for Kylie-Marie, like."</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"In Blaenau?! Bet she's delighted. Don't you remember what me and Siencyn told you about the rain, the slate, the <b>Council Scousers</b> whining in the slagheaps, the Sundays, the consonants - Oh God! the consonants?" &nbsp; </i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"I thought you was joking and it's really some Tenby in the sky. Kylie-Marie could be crying, but I can't tell 'cause of the rain. And we're indoors."</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"Well, Iago bach, I'd love to chat all night but this <b>perique won't smoke itself</b>, so -"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"We need your help mun!"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"Again, Iago, I'm several hundreds of miles away, simultaneously and at the same time overstimulated and sedated by <b>fermentation and fungi</b>, and own neither a car nor a sense of empathy, so once again -"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"Can you just tell us where to get something to eat? We're in this guest house, and they laughed when we asked about dinner. Laughed without opening their mouths..."</i><br /><i><br /></i>Iago had once spent an evening buying drinks for an "SAS officer" whose convenient knowledge of Welsh had helped him recruit the <i>"Tibeeshans"</i> of Tibet to imaginary espionage. Sending the boy into a Blaenau pub would lead to his having <i>"Deddf Eiddo!"</i> <b>tattooed on his intestines</b> with a tool fashioned from his own overdeveloped coccyx. <i>&nbsp;</i><br /><br /><i>"Drive down to 'The Grapes' in Maentwrog,"</i> I counselled. <i>"The village is twinned with Roger Corman's out-takes, and you can expect the longest silent stare since the doomed London type arrives in the Cornish pub in Hammer's splendid '<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UI1xa7kagM">The Reptile</a>', but they do <b>pre-killed food</b> and the main road to Minfford and freedom is but a black and lurid tarn away".</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"We got here and was so shocked that we just smoked this bag of weed and now we can barely move. What we going to do?"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"You could send out for fish and chips, but don't ask for scampi - some of the blokes who come up for air from Llechwedd <b>feel for amphibians</b> and might track you down. Your wife is a woman - surely she must have some chocolate?"</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"Like I said, we're half-Marleyed so the <b>Valleys Family Pack of Revels</b> is long gone. Plus the freezing fog keeps the blow swirling at knee-level, or chest-height for the staff, so everytime we try to go downstairs we gets another hit. It's mental."</i><br /><br />I thought hard, then rapped out a number. <i>"This is my brother Morthwyl's phone. Just say the following - 'Blaenau. Stoned cormorant. Bird's yours. Duw ffyc aye'. Ignore the gnawing sound. He'll find you. Now hang up."</i><br /><br />Morthwyl located the creature that had once been Iago deposited at <i>"The Brondanw Arms"</i> in nearby Llanfrothen, a hamlet celebrated throughout Wales for having expelled its vicar in the 19th century - from the business end of the <b>giant Sumatran rat</b> that the Independent Calvinist-Methodist (Calvinist) minister has raised like a son, rumour has it.<br /><br />A word with the Assembly Government, and Iago got a job fashioning <b>Welsh-shaped marital aids </b>for the enervated satraps of Umm al-Quwain. Parts of him feature on a series of Emirati postage stamps.<br /><br />Kylie-Marie stayed in Maentwrog, where she entertains the impious with her <i>cimbalom</i> at the 24-hour graveyard. And as for the good people of Blaenau and Llanfrothen, they sing and dance and await their next visitors at dusk.<br /><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/K0uTp_tfyNg?rel=0" width="420"></iframe> No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-33194007131789193182012-08-19T09:38:00.000+00:002012-08-20T08:58:41.668+00:00Blind Narcissus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K_oeLJE7XRk/UC9VugyUT7I/AAAAAAAAAzs/lBIccOMoMhY/s1600/tom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K_oeLJE7XRk/UC9VugyUT7I/AAAAAAAAAzs/lBIccOMoMhY/s1600/tom.jpg" /></a></div>Facebook, the simpleton's way to start your day, has let the mask slip of late. Big-palmed creator Mark Zuckerberg pitched it as a sort of <b>computer smoothie</b> - no chemicals, no plastic wrapping, no monthly book selection blocking up your letter box, no bailiffs biffing your old gran because you skipped the small print.<br /><br />Its acolytes sailed gaily through the Gates of Spontaneous Order, eager to share their news and photos with friends they don't see every day. But this band of pure users has long been smothered in the <b>mental dandruff </b>of:<br /><br /><br /><ul><li><b>Night bus nightmares</b> lacking the trip-switch betwixt brain and fingers</li><li>Brazen blogpost pluggers like me</li><li>Playground showoffs impressing the girls with their <b>update push-ups</b></li><li>Link jockeys with news and weather updates for people who don't have Internet access, and&nbsp;</li><li>Bored secret policemen.</li></ul><br /><br />The difference between the early innocents and these <b>human retreads</b> is motive. The former want to share; the latter need to sell. Now that Facebook is stuffed with hand-me-down opinions and stale jokes, Mr Zuckerberg has set aside his bucket of soda and commanded the macro-minions to slip back into their <i>"Yo La Tengo"</i> t-shirts and get messing with some minds.<br /><br />My favourite coarsening of the Facebook grain is the <i>"Highlight"</i> button. This lets buffoons shuffle their latest brain daubs to the top of his friends' feeds for a small fee and no conceivable reason. Those who avail themselves of this new service might find it cheaper and more effective to change their avatar to an animation of an <b>endless deflating phallus</b>.<br /><br />I'm reminded of the lager pump in Reading's <b>Hobgoblin pub</b> (now the Reading Alehouse - flavoursome as ever but far less intimidating). This establishment still caters exclusively to men in beige who gave up on women when Felicity Kendall married and now dedicate themselves to flat beer and books with gnomes as the protagonists.<br /><br />A student absorbed in mobile phones and dance music might occasionally press through the fog of halitosis, survey the barrels of Old Hedgefumbler and alight with relief on the cheery, <b>elf-free Fosters label</b>.<br /><br /><i>"Pint of Fosters, please!"</i> he'd chirrup.<br /><br />The matted mass of <b>sinew, soup and Ulster Scots belligerence</b> that was Paul, the crepuscular landlord, would then ring the Lager Bell, and all would gather round and mock.<br /><br />The Highlight button is <b>Facebook's Lager Bell</b>, a tool for showing others you're a tool.<br /><br />Another sign that Facebook is toying with its creatures like a <b>kettle-wielding toddler</b> bestride his ant farm was Mr Zuckerberg's twin decision to float the company on the stock market then get wed. These two acts are calculated to sweep all Facebookers into a handy tray of rage.<br /><br />Users see Facebook as a self-sustaining anarchist cooperative of fisherfolk, where money has long yielded to black flags and free love - or at least amusing photographs of the like. They don't like markets, unless run by <b>tie-dyed white-flighters</b> posing as farmers, and they certainly don't like their blow-up Internet doll being sold as someone's dowry.<br /><br />But Mark Zuckerberg's most galling gag, set up long before he careered off in his ironic <i>"Just Married!"</i> titanium Heinkel bubblecar, was <b>Timeline</b>. One morning you log on, and your neat ribbon of thinks has been spliced and jammed like some hipster's birthday party retro mixtape.<br /><br />Some sigh and live with it, others flee to Google+ (<i>"Where The Manager's Golf Buddies Are"</i>), and the rest go all haiku and lose themselves in Twitter. Luis Buñuel shot his films in a linear fashion - I imagine because he wanted to know what happened next - and Facebook has blundered into the hag-haunted halls of hubris if it thinks it's further out there than <b>Spain's top Surrealist and smoker</b>.<br /><br />So how can Mark keep us down on his farm now that he's seen Gay Paree? One way would be to adopt my <b>Update Displacement and Disclaimer Editorial Reversal System</b> (UDDERS). How does this work?<br /><br />In its present, pedestrian configuration, Facebook allows the user to post and delete their own updates, and merely like, dislike, share or comment on others. UDDERS works in reverse. It allows you &nbsp;to post solely on the feed of others and, by <b>the magic of hacking</b>, via their IDs.<br /><br />This is much more like it. Imagine four old friends - <b>John, Paul, George and Ringo</b>. It's easy if you try. John is a bit of a dick and packed full of mordant conscience. Most of his chums quietly block his updates, so how can he get across these urgent views on Vietnam, hair and decreasingly imaginative music? Well, UDDERS allows him to post as, say, Paul.<br /><br />Paul is a bit of a dick but clings to a shotglass of self-awareness that keeps his ideas about Ireland and meat largely to himself. Consider the interest, then, if updates like <i>"Playing for HM The Queen's Jubilee! Fantastic!!"</i> and&nbsp;<i>"Playing at the Olympics! Fantastic!!"</i>&nbsp;were superseded by <i>"Hey Mr Obama, yer Agent Orange gives me the blues!"</i> That's one <b>deep cavity search </b>booked at JFK next time Paul plans to give his regards to Broad St.<br /><br />Or take Ringo. He's a bit of a dick, but affable enough when he concentrates on <b>Bond girls and practicing his signature</b>. Unlike John, he doesn't want to force his helium opinions on others. Like all drummers, he is one of life's terrible simplifiers - if you don't believe me, listen to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcEKAWZ1Nbk">Buddy Rich's version of Birdland</a> - and so prefers the <i>"altruistic elimination"</i> application on UDDERS that allows you to delete other users' posts.<br /><br />George is a bit of a dick - <b>lives on a trampoline in Henley</b> - but funds <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/nov/14/favourite-film-withnail-and-i">terrifically tasty films</a>. Ringo deletes all his posts, replacing them with <i>"Peace and Luve"</i>, and George really doesn't mind. Everyone's happy.<br /><br />I have other ideas for applications to make Facebook a site fit to loll in:<br /><br /><b><i>1. The Political Chameleon.</i> </b>A young lady asks to befriend you, and you idly wonder whether she might be a <b>nympho whose father owns a brewery</b>. She earnestly comments on a cheek-streaking array of stuff. You have neither the time nor inclination to read them, but would like to leave either a pithy comment or knowing link to keep her sweet.<br /><br />Lo - the Chameleon codes her updates by colour and shape, so you know <b>where she stands </b>and you may stoop.<br /><br /><ul><li><b>Red Wedge</b> = Old Left: trade unions, banners, her lips move when Ed Miliband speaks.</li><li><b>Red Crescent</b> = WikiLeaks Left: trustafarian or Oxbridge-via-pinched-suburbs. Media fringes, Trotskyist blogs, hates daddy.</li><li><b>Green Thorn</b> = ditto, but lives in Brighton.</li><li><b>Grey Goth</b> = Occupy, Obama, Ovaries.</li><li><b>Blue Frigate</b> = Rugby Club Right: Clarkson stalker, strike breaker, loves daddy.</li><li><b>Rainbow Vortex</b> = Cthulhu Central: Ayn Rand, Ron Paul - Run Miles.</li></ul><br />You might manage to steer a Frigate into harbour, but you'll be <b>hosing down the docks </b>for weeks afterwards. Otherwise look out for the <i>Pink Glove (Blairites)</i> or <i>Swedish Flag (Coalition)</i> - they're all looking for love right now.<br /><br /><i><b>2. Automatic Arguer. </b></i>You post something bold and arresting, such as a merged photo of Presidents Bush and Obama, or a European Union flag with a For Sale sign on it, hoover down a can of lager and await the debate. But nothing happens, apart from a few <i>"likes"</i> and <i>"uh-huhs"</i>. You've hit rock-lobster bottom on the Shelf of Self-Knowledge with a clammy slap, as all your Facebook friends - apart from the <b>Japanese cosplayer </b>you suspect might be your old chemistry master - clearly share your scintillating <i>Weltanschauung</i>.<br /><br />That's where <i>Automatic Arguer</i> comes in. The free app generates ill-humoured snarls, threats to defriend, or photographs from children's hospitals in your target country.<br /><br />But for a small fee it will post your erudite update on the wall of the Middle Eastern political movement you'd least like to be kidnapped by, embellished with some swastikas, Stars of David or amusing fusion of both, along with a composite of your profile photo <b>having good times with their best daughters</b>.<br /><br />Then it will disable your <i>"mute" </i>button and sign off with your home address. <b>In Comic Sans</b>.<br /><br /><i><b>3. We Live As We Dream.</b></i> Depression is the Plimsoll Line that divides healthy societies from Britain. Post something about bipolarity and your American friends will offer all sorts of encouragement. But from the Tamar to the Thames comes the <b>sound of distant shuffling</b>. Why? Beats me, but here's what to do.<br /><br />Install this app, as it's ideal for the <b>chatty melancholic</b>. If there's an election, weather event or excellent new film going down in America and you simply can't find anyone on Facebook to put their arms around your updates, click on one of the three settings to get the desired result:<br /><br /><ul><li><b>Sympathy. </b>This hacks various friends' accounts and sends you inspiring thoughts etched on stock photos of domestic animals at sunset, and makes your laptop smell of chocolate.</li><li><b>Retired Colonel. </b>Comes in <i>"2nd Duchess of Gloucester's Own Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire Battalion"</i> or <i>"US Marine Corps"</i> modes. One counsels brisk walks, cold showers, thinking of the regiment and marrying well. The other suggests that you might want to drop something and give him twenty thereof.</li><li><b>Head Tilt. </b>When words only wound, this tips all the photos on Facebook by a reassuring 25 degrees.</li></ul><br />Please note - despite some persistent complaints, there is no <b>Voices In My Head</b> setting. It just means you've stumbled onto Twitter.<br /><br />.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-42052467052788956742012-07-28T08:06:00.001+00:002012-07-28T08:09:31.459+00:00Recoil after Volleyball<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HeiZ5GwCamc/UBOdZbLKEoI/AAAAAAAAAzY/4hPcFzlouNw/s1600/osborne.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HeiZ5GwCamc/UBOdZbLKEoI/AAAAAAAAAzY/4hPcFzlouNw/s1600/osborne.jpg" /></a></div>I missed the Olympic opening celebration of Britishness, because I fell asleep reading a Max Hastings book. That's how Daily Telegraph I am. <br /><br />Danny Boyle did himself proud, I'm sure, but only if his show featured:<br /><br /><ul><li>Steptoe &amp; Son;</li><li>couples taking their dogs for romantic weekends in Cotswold hotels;</li><li>Mrs T trailing a bottle of Bells about her bedroom, wearing slippers made of Argies and miners;</li><li>students trying to force down a Guinness;</li><li>Ollie Reed mumbling an apology to an understanding Eddie Izzard;</li><li>pink-eyed kids marching down a Newcastle street, playing kazoos;</li><li>synchronised tutting;</li><li>Sir Sean Connery wearing one of the Scottish man-skirts, pissed on a Marbella beach;</li><li>The Question Time audience waking up in Iran;</li><li>Shaky wrestling Richard out of Richard &amp; Judy; and</li><li>Edward VIII finding out the hard way that Wallis Simpson was a man.</li></ul><br />All narrated by the ghost of John Osborne. Anything less, and we might as well be westerly Dutchmen.<br /><br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-2353673015666071422012-07-04T11:41:00.001+00:002012-07-05T08:17:47.192+00:00Ich, Eich Dyn, Dien<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mrut7cJ-z6M/T_QqZiA3TtI/AAAAAAAAAzM/YPq9MSDw5Bw/s1600/vicar.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mrut7cJ-z6M/T_QqZiA3TtI/AAAAAAAAAzM/YPq9MSDw5Bw/s1600/vicar.jpeg" /></a></div>Apologies for the lull in blogging - my bid for the directorship-general of the BBC required considerable time for mental, spiritual and other refreshment. I wish my rival, the <b><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18702195">late John Entwistle</a></b>, the very best in the dusty tasks that face him. I would have been a tough act to follow, and how harder will it be to lurk in the mighty tripod of my shadow.<br /><br />With the grace for which we Welsh are noted, I hereby put all my <b><a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/old-fags-and-cabbage-stumps.html">previous</a> <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/tribuni-plebis-consulari-potestate.html">programme</a> <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/revolution-televised.html">proposals</a></b> at his disposal, in the certain knowledge that, if spared due legal scrutiny, they will prove nothing if not stimulating. <br /><br />I would also like to mark this 4th of July by suggesting that Mr Entwistle should ponder the article in which&nbsp; Nick Cohen wonders why the BBC does not produce the sort of <b><a href="http://standpointmag.co.uk/television-july-august-12-the-problem-with-auntie-nick-cohen-bbc-jubilee-new-culture-forum-dennis-sewell-homeland-the-wire">pant-shredding drama</a></b> that the Americans have made their own.<br /><br />The reason Americans fashion such telly excellence as <i>"24"</i>, <i>"The Sopranos"</i>, <i>"Treme"</i> and <i>"The Wire"</i> is simply that they have <b>massive, brass balls</b>, and they like the sound these make as they clack together while their owners stride down Main Street, sparks flying from their leather chaps.<br /><br />The pallid knackers of the BBC, by contrast, are clamped in one of those devices that Accident &amp; Emergency crews regularly have to remove from the <b>damper parts of Anglican clergymen</b>, and so bring us the likes of "<a href="http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/TV-Review-Small-Things/story-12048720-detail/story.html">All The Small Things</a>", a stack of ticked boxes in flight from the audience.<br /><br />The plucky resistance movement at BBC4 tries hard to serve up steaming hot television, and they deserve some praise for their <b>Scandinavian Knight's Move</b> - a cheeky ploy to resell pasty Danish remakes of ITV's Mirrentastic <i>"Prime Suspect"</i> as Euro neo-noir. But we can't rely on six million herringheads to provide all our two-dimensional dramatic needs.<br /><br />The BBC will not slough off its <b>sub-Rattigan cosiness</b> overnight, so I propose a manageable transition by literally bringing American elements into existing British formats. Here are a couple for free: <i><b>&nbsp;</b></i><br /><br /><i><b>Ponty PD. </b></i>The United States takes over the Gwent Police beat in Pontypool, if only to make damn sure that any new Piers Morgans are dealt with <i>in situ</i>. In episode one, Chief Inspector Serpico Terminaterwitz sends a SWAT team to Mrs Prys-Price-Parry-Jones's late husband Gwil's pigeon loft, where their layabout son has been flattening pennies so that they will fit in the 2d slot of the pre-decimal cigarette machine at Pontypool leisure centre.<br /><br /><i><b>Donnie Darkie. </b></i>The dense, multilayered psychological teen thriller is rewritten as a British 1970s sitcom. Robin Askwith is the psychiatrist, Liz Fraser is the mum, Jim Davisdon is a giant racist rabbit.<br /><br />The BBC Drama types in Cardiff could knock those out with a flick of a powdery mirror and still have time to catch the last train to England. <b>I await the call.</b><br /><br /><br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-56925866493368525402012-04-29T19:00:00.002+00:002012-04-30T08:14:31.860+00:00Du côté de chez Swan<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fUgyGIdNREk/T52ORJBqGHI/AAAAAAAAAy8/PdErTRTIFGs/s1600/jack.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fUgyGIdNREk/T52ORJBqGHI/AAAAAAAAAy8/PdErTRTIFGs/s320/jack.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>"What are you staring at?"</i> Annette asked the pair of <b>blurry-faced soaks</b> across the bar.<i> "Ewer tits, luv,"</i> one grinned. He raised his glass and returned to the pleasures of the contemplative life. </div><br /><div><i>"Swansea,"</i> I said, <i>"is another country, they do things differently by here." </i></div><br /><div>Annette had been a student at University College, Swansea (formerly Sketty Anglers Club) long enough to have shed her Saxon, secular resistance to the direct and deeply spiritual sensibility of the <b>Cambrian aesthete</b>. And Swansea is where you are most likely to encounter this Epicurean approach at its most expressive:</div><br /><div><ul><li>Cardiff's twin tongues are caught between the bump of business and the <b>grind of ambition</b>,</li><li>Llanelli's cheeks are still pinched by the <b>chapel pew</b>, and</li><li>all points between are hobbled by <b>proletarian piety</b>.</li></ul></div><br /><div>Swansea, however, is <b>Wales's Casablanca</b>. Bohemia sups with the picaresque in the curved and shingly Rick's Bar that is the bay. High above, Mumbles <i>maquisards</i> lead thirsty refugees from Calvinist Carmarthenshire through the Rosehill Quarry corridor. And there's no Major Strasser to spoil your good times, although the local Captain Renaults retain a professional interest in bribery and Bulgarians.<br /><br />Just as Ray Liotta in <i>Goodfellas</i> always wanted to be a gangster, I've endlessly yearned to live in Swansea. My father used to drive the <i>Trawscambria</i> coach down there from Dolgellau, and it was a regular treat to accompany him. We told the school I was off <b>gelding shepherds</b> or something suitably rural.</div><br /><div></div>Our day out in Swansea began with an early lunch in one of the bombsite pubs near the bus station, a rummage in Ralph's Bookshop, then a Bond film on the Kingsway (first watched, then acted out) before herding our <b>day-release Yetis</b> back to their Snowdon sanctuary.<br /><br /><div></div>That first descent into Swansea stirred my Manichean soul, for the town is <b>bisected by two axes</b> (NB <i>"Welshisms"</i> will steadily creep into my copy. There's a prize for the reader who spots them all. For an explanation, follow this <a href="http://thedailyscorch.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/im-anfang-war-die-tat.html">link</a> from Madame Boyo).<br /><br /><div></div>At the end of one axis <b>pearly Mumbles </b>bobs in a cornflower sea, while at the other Port Talbot steams in the sulphurous Sun. Between them curls the Bay, a drunken proscenium for the cast of local strolling players.<br /><br /><div></div>The other axis of diametrically opposed opposites gifts the town a sunny, palm-strewn esplanade that <b>makes Cannes look like Clacton</b>, while simultaneously and at the same time drawing a veil of widowed rain across the Swansea Valley. This shields our Shangri-La from the hairy-handed hordes beyond Cwmbwrla.<br /><br /><div></div>The fulcrum around which these twin axes revolve is the <b>Swansea Jack pub</b> on Oystermouth Road. They say the <i>flâneur</i> draped across a chair at <i>Les Deux Magots</i> will see <i>le Tout-Paris</i> pass by.And if you crouch beneath the boarded windows of The Jack for long enough, all the town's burglars, fences, cock-wrestlers, shapeshifters, amateur apothecaries and punch-up paramours will whirl before your eyes on a fist-shaped carousel.<br /><br />The off-yellow <i>omphalos</i> of The Jack was, in my day, ringed by the bus station, magistrates' court and jail, like the crust on a teenage self-piercer's navel. Its patrons would spill out of the station into The Jack, wake up in jail, drag their <b>truncheoned pods</b> across to the magistrates' court, return to jail, get released, back down The Jack, wake up in jail, and so it goes.<br /><br />I am convinced that it is this very perpetual motion that agitates the Earth's polar axis, rather than some fancy science talk about gravity, the Moon and ley lines. The <b>Blind Watchman sets his Seiko</b> by the opening times of The Swansea Jack, and you knows it.<br /><br />Like every downy-bearded blow-in, I dreamed of becoming a latter-day <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/dylan-thomas-and-the-kardomah-set-525736.html">Kardomah Boy</a>. All that's left of these efforts is some unusually bad verse and a <b>draft screenplay</b>. Provisionally named <i>"It Happened By Here"</i>, It toys with motifs from <i>Astérix</i> in a Britain occupied by the Nazis in 1941:<br /><div><br /></div><div>The King's in Canada, Churchill's in his cups, and the <b>sole beacon of resistance</b> is The Swansea Jack, which has held out against what the defenders call <i>"them fucking Frenchies"</i> since the Battle of Muswell Hill. It ends with what my co-writer Sioba Siencyn dubbed a <i>"brimstone barbecue of the Boches"</i>, and would have done for Oystermouth Road what <i>Twin Town</i> did for Dunvant. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>S4C were interested</b>, but saw problems with getting European Union funding.</div><div><br />Then the dam of life burst, and cast me on the lower reaches of the Thames where I wallow still. Yet Swansea moments recur even here, like a <i>madeleine</i> dipped in <b>oyster water</b>.<br /><br />Siencyn and I were enjoying a pint of <a href="http://www.felinfoel-brewery.co.uk/">Felinfoel</a>, the force that drives the green fuse through Gorseinon, at the Reading Real Ale Festival some years back. The <b>juxtaposition of beer with Englishmen</b> - and this alone - naturally bade us speak Welsh.</div><div><br /></div><div>A young fellow sidled over and asked whether we were from Wales. We were. <i>"Can I ask you a question?"</i> he ventured. <i>"No doubt,"</i> we replied, nodding that he should first <b>prick our tongues with hops</b>. He returned with three more pints, and proceeded:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"I was at a stag weekend in Swansea - you know it? - a month ago, and we'd just drunk our way alone the <b>Mumbles Mile</b> to the pier. We were merry but hardly boisterous, let alone lairy. Just waiting for the last cab back to town.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"Then a bunch of local lads come up and say <b>'scuse us, but, fancy a fight?'</b></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"We pointed out politely that if it was all the same to them we'd rather not, when they began pleading. <b>'Go on, mun, just a quick scrap!'</b></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"I was about to explain that we were social workers who work at returning <b>mental cases</b> to the community, and therefore had full respect for Wales's unique and endangered culture, when each of them launched himself at one of us, and we rolled to the ground.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"I expected the worst, but was surprised to find that I was on the receiving end of little more than a gentle kneading, like a patty of breakfast laverbread. I parried in kind, then after a few minutes one of the locals yelled <b>'hey, they're letting us in at Cinders!' </b></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"With that our opponents stood up, dusted off their stonewashed jeans, beamed <b>'magic scrap, mun, cheers!'</b> and were gone."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"What was all that about?"</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Ah, where do you begin to explain the <b>Friendly Fight</b>, Wales's most potent yet unsung contribution to world culture? We're not talking about Khrushchev and Bulganin stopping their limos at Kuntsevo for a drunken rumble in the tundra, or some John Wayne saloon-bar blarney. This is the altruistic sharing of theatrical violence, with the aim of fostering the Welsh Classical unities of <i>"closing time", "two-fisted action"</i> and <i>"any place will do"</i>.<br /><br />A Welsh night out - or <i>"sesh"</i> - cannot whimper away on a wave of <i>"see-yas"</i> or drown in a repeat kebab's chili sauce. It must soar to new heights of <b>purpled-panted passion</b> at the Pontarddulais bus stop, or else vault slag-heaps of convention with a slow-burn scrummage.<br /><br />Only then, all split-lipped, slapped-up, sung-out and spent, can the Welshman return in peace to greet his waiting wife, whose silhouette already arches like a <b>curler-crowned Medusa</b> amid the wheelie-bin pillars of his home. </div><div><br /></div><div>Swansea's genius for geniality cushions the <b>cosh of conviviality </b>as it cracks your coccyx on a warm West Cross night, I expanded to our rapidly retreating guest. </div><div><br /></div><div>Nothing sums this up better than one of my last sights of Swansea on a college visit many years ago. Some kindly councillor had put up a concrete island in the middle of Oystermouth Road to help civilians flee to the safety of the beach. As we drove by, a vest-clad veteran had commandered the island in the name of The Jack. <b>Girdled with cider</b>, he swung his septic fists at the cars flying by on both sides, spinning and roaring like a Cambrian Caliban.</div><div><br /></div><div>The drivers ploughed on, sure they had just missed a glassing. But the Man of the Jack wasn't warning them off. He was inviting them in for a few jars, some seaweed, and a chat with his friends dead and living. This <b>sawdust-stubbled Cyclops </b>will endure when all the marinas dry up. And while guests from the future puzzle over our cryptic cycle paths, he will still be drinking down The Jack. And it will always be your round, mun.<br /><br /><br /></div><div></div><div></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com52tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-18171372219807250252012-04-23T07:05:00.002+00:002012-04-23T07:08:49.559+00:00Black and Blue Moon<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kg-yBUoFqKs/T5Pn55oe8YI/AAAAAAAAAxY/kFLI-lLBEN8/s1600/tintin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kg-yBUoFqKs/T5Pn55oe8YI/AAAAAAAAAxY/kFLI-lLBEN8/s320/tintin.jpg" width="241" /></a><b>Wales to fire Englishman at Moon</b><br /><br /><i>Text of report from Taffinfform news agency&nbsp;</i><br /><i><br /></i><br />Morgangrad (formerly Cardiff), 23 April: <i>"I's proud to announce that Wales will put the <strong>first ever man on the Moon</strong>,"</i> Minister of Technology, Cars and Fishing Mathonwy ap Scarmas told reporters on day release from the Martyr Cerys Matthews Corrective Ink Detention Centre on Monday [23 April]. <i>"And that man is going to be an English,"</i> he laughed.<br /><br />Responding to international and some indistinct domestic criticism of previous official celebrations of St George's Day (see Taffinfform report "<a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/st-georges-day-apology.html">Welsh Police Apologise in Advance for St George's Day violence</a>", <i>passim</i>), Ap Scarmas assured whoever that the Cymru Rouge decision to entrust this task to a representative of Wales's largest <strong>non-badger source of infectious diseases </strong>was evidence that the People's Government was totally and utterly committed to&nbsp;<i>"diversity, the Millennium and that"</i>.<br /><br /><i>"Ever since the dawn of time, thousands of years ago, Man has looked at the Moon and wondered what the fuck it is,"</i> the minister expanded, over the <strong>impromptu lunch </strong>he had just poured himself. <i>"And none more so than us Welsh.</i><br /><br /><i>"Your Egyptians worship the Sun and mad animal things like in science fiction," </i>Ap Scarmas held forth.<i> "The Jews and Arabs stand around mountains, twatting each other with their heathen versions of the Bible. The Aztecs stick <strong>bones through their cocks</strong>. Good luck to all of them, we says. But Welsh scholars and visionaries have always had a thing about the Moon, from our main lady goddess Arianrhod, right through to Martyr Max Boyce. So it's only fair that we get to conquer it first. The Wirral is not enough."</i><br /><br /><i>"Cheers!"</i> he added.<br /><br />Answering questions about the technical aspects of the Moon mission (codename <i>"Anghenfil yn y Lloer - 2012"</i>), the minister waved vaguely at a powerpoint presentation screen, onto which he had sellotaped a drawing of an <strong>Acme cartoon circus cannon</strong> perched on top of Mynydd Morgan [formerly Mount Snowdon].<br /><br /><i>"Out of this big gun we will fire a <strong>specially adapted Hillman Imp</strong>,"</i> he continued. <i>"It will be aimed at the Moon, which research on the government's computer indicates is about 32 miles up and as flat as a posh bird's chest.</i><br /><i><br /></i><br /><i>"In that motor will be Wales's and the world's first moonanaut, Dave Eversough-Sorey."</i> [chairman of the banned Plaid y Sais (English People's Party) and the country's most persistent, longest-serving and <strong>widely-dispersed political prisoner</strong> - see Taffinfform report <i>"Welsh opposition leader rushed to prison in two separate vans, again"</i>].<br /><br /><i>"I can't say how pleased the government is that Dave is going to accept this momentous honour, because we're keeping it as a surprise for him,"</i> the upcoming Cymru Rouge luminary and future convicted <strong>Manx spy </strong>explained.<br /><br /><i>"He'll have all mod cons for his trip, innit," </i>Ap Scarmas set out. <i>"There'll be 800 Embassy for him, another 800 for the aliens, and 200 Regal for their women. And Silk Cut in case there are <strong>any poufs</strong>. Fair play."</i><br /><i><br /></i><br />Asked about food supplies, the former goat-butter conceded <i>"We've been pumping the poor bugger with girl hormones for weeks, so he'll be able to <strong>produce his own breast milk </strong>for the journey, mind. There's a sack of flummery and a churn in the boot, running off the battery."</i><br /><br />Ap Scarmas sounded a note of caution to the late Eversough-Sorey.&nbsp;<i>"He'd better have the Hillman back by Friday, though but. That Chancellor Merkel is visiting from Germany. The president wants to <strong>take her up the Rhinogs</strong>."&nbsp;</i><br /><br /><i>"And!"</i> he leered officially.<br /><br />In response to a reporter's query about any research experiments that the orbital Englishman might be expected to carry out while&nbsp;<i>"flying between God's uprights"</i>, the minister concluded&nbsp;<i>"Absolutely. Dave's chief scientific objective will be to work out how to get his self back by here, 'cause we've got no clue."</i><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-56856016754805463702012-03-14T11:35:00.011+00:002012-03-14T12:12:06.621+00:00Camrastan<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-957LcpmrYSw/T2CHkT9PYwI/AAAAAAAAAxI/KScCds1nCVw/s1600/morris.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 185px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 273px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719720584662704898" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-957LcpmrYSw/T2CHkT9PYwI/AAAAAAAAAxI/KScCds1nCVw/s320/morris.jpg" /><div></a></div>The <strong>clock struck eleven </strong>yet again as Jethro Gill shouldered his way into the British Film Institute. It's now called Old Peculiar's Pelicular Panopticon, he had to remind himself. And it was only nine-thirty on a damp March morning. <em>"A trifle inclement,"</em> as the wireless had chuckled in Banter - the new English standard.<br /><br />It was always eleven o'clock - opening time - since the <strong>Great Shiving</strong>. Getting used to the lingo was only the half of it. Jethro reached for a cigarette, only to realise he'd left his stash at home. Since the Shiving only pipes and roll-ups were allowed, and a cigar on the wife's birthday. The me'm-sah'b, Her Indoors.<br /><br /><em>"Briars and rollies - the whole country looks like a <strong>Cornish town council</strong>,"</em> Jethro muttered as he rifled through the in-tray.<br /><br />He remembered the revolution well. It had all happened so suddenly. The <strong>last pub in Henley </strong>had put up its shutters in the face of a thirsty party of Thames walkers, just as a Community Patrol officer was telling a joiner outside a Bermondsey bookies to put out his Benson.<br /><br />The resulting riots spread nationwide. The shires, suburbs and inner cities marched on Westminster, the politicians fled, and the people stood bewildered and triumphant. The triumvirate - <strong>Clarkson, Lumley and Vegas</strong> - had time only to design a coat of arms for the New Commonwealth (a Jag hub cap, with pitbull rampant and can and ashtray gules, motto <em>"Circum Tuum"</em>) before they fell to squabbling.<br /><br />Then came the <em>"Sallying Forth"</em>, as the chap with the plan, the CAMRA Man, launched the Great Shiving. <strong>Soup-stained Savonarolas </strong>of the Campaign for Real Ale exploited the national binge and endless smoke-ins to seize the gutted shell of the Mansion House and total power.<br /><br />Tribune Joanna Lumley alone survived as the figurehead of state, wheeled out on <strong>Jerome K Jerome Day</strong> to smash a cask on the hull of a new naval skiff.<br /><br />The rest was a nightmare, a <strong>nightmare of horror</strong>. Jeans were banned unless elastic-waisted, all lager was drained into the Thames, filter tips, trainers and shaving kits were thrown on the bonfire of the vanities in Trafalgar Square.<br /><br />Within days all the good-looking women had fled to Wales before the punishment battalions of dieticians and flatscreen TV salesmen were forced to raised <strong>Offa's Anti-Taff Defence Barrier </strong>high into the Marcher sky.<br /><br />England was no longer England. Now it was <strong>Camrastan</strong>, a chillingly jocular epithet intended to <em>"win over our Mohammedan charges to the ways of the wort"</em>. You couldn't laugh anymore, you had to <em>"chortle", "titter" </em>or<em> "guffaw"</em>. Doors didn't open, they were <em>"portals"</em> to be <em>"negotiated"</em>. The profiles of Pratchett, Tolkien and Felicity Kendall graced the new Guinea currency.<br /><br />Even buying a pint of <em>"cooking"</em> was like sitting an extended oral exam for your <strong>Masters in Halitosis</strong>. <em>"Special"</em> and the maltier brews were reserved for the Old Campaigners - the CAMRAts as the malcontents called them - and the dreaded Porter Police.<br /><br />Jethro shuddered, and turned to the <strong>flickering Amstrad</strong> with its fashionable tweed trim. His job was to bring films into line with Campaign teachings. No lager, no grooming and no girlfriends, unless they were chaste and mumsy barmaids. <br /><br />There were technical teams tasked with etching beards onto Bogart, cutting Grace Kelly's highballs down to halves of shandy, and curling <strong>Private Walker's Woodbines </strong>into Bent Rhodesians. <br /><br />Jethro was a writer, and had to recast dialogue to accommodate <strong>tepid ale, flannels and cricket </strong>in every imaginable plotline, while excising references to non-comic sex. This proved surprisingly easy with most British films, and hardly needed doing to anything before 1954, but Jethro took grudging pride in his adaptations of the French New Wave and Italian Neorealists.<br /><br /><em>"Les Quatre Cents Coups"</em> became a teenage seaside musical, and <em>"La Dolce Vita"</em> followed a <strong>Brummie motorcycle rep </strong>as he persuaded Romans to dress warmly and appreciate the superior horsepower of the Triumph Bonneville.<br /><br />But Jethro knew his time was up. There, at the top of the pile, was his treatment of <em>"Ice Cold in Alex"</em>. He had agonised over it for days, but could find no way of persuading even the most anoraked frothblower that the Desert Rats would have yomped through Libya, eschewing all that Afrika Korps beaded Pilsener, for the promise of a cloudy tankard of <strong>Champion's Speckled Johnson</strong>.<br /><br />With a reflective <em>"Fuck this"</em>, Jethro rolled up his radical reworking of the John Mills classic as <em>"Warm and Soapy in Suez"</em>, a 70s sex romp, jammed it in the pneumatique and stomped off down <strong>The Tethered Goat</strong>.<br /><br />The Goat looked like any Camrastan ale house. Walls as jaundiced and uneven as the landlord's teeth, faintly amusing notices to the toilets, a bar pocked with men in broken spectacles peering through the murk of their pintpots at some point below the barmaid's chin, and an aroma of <strong>dog and slipper </strong>tainting the Burley fug.<br /><br />Jethro nodded to the barmaid. <em>"Pint of Johnson?"</em> she asked. <em>"The Abdication Special,"</em> he wheezed. <em>"I'll need to check the cellar.</em>" She left the bar and unlocked a door tucked away behind a screen. Returning a moment later, she said <em>"It's off"</em>. Jethro nodded and, while no one was watching, slipped through the unlocked door.<br /><br />He rapped out the <em>"Satisfaction"</em> riff on a mildly disturbing amateur portrait of June Whitfield. The eyes came alive, and a bloodshot glance took him in. <em>"Grolsch!"</em> Jethro hissed. The portrait slid aside, and he stepped into <strong>The Fist and Fury</strong> - Soho's most notorious lagerama.<br /><br />Glass, smoked chrome, prawn-homage crisps and every variety of lager, from <strong>premium to pig</strong>, came at him from all corners. He lit a proffered Lambert &amp; Butler, necked a Budvar and drank in the scene.<br /><br />In the corner was an illegal feed of <strong>Scottish MTV full of Shakiras</strong> for the youngsters. The only drawback was poor soundproofing, which meant the jukebox was silent. But at least he could watch the vids - Clash, Stones, Jam, Oasis and Idol. And all the birds were still slags.<br /><br />Then a <strong>Boadicean prow</strong> crested the waves of crop tops and cock jokes. Beach bleached hair framed 70s blue eyeliner, Caligula lips and an embonpoint you could eat your breakfast off.<br /><br /><em>"I call them my Full English," </em>she breathed, <em>"And you just drank my beer"</em>. She opened another bottle on her navel. <em>"Want to try that again?"</em><br /><br />===================================================================<br /><br />Jethro and Marianne awoke on a <strong>bed of crisps</strong>. <em>"Oh Jethro, I thought I was a lesbian until I met you!"<br /><br />"No doubt,"</em> he grunted, dragging himself across to her record collection. Disappointment. It was all CAMRA approved <strong>bumptious hilarity</strong> - skiffle, Flanders and Swann, Your 100 Best Tunes, Macc Lads. Then he tugged out the vinyl itself - Cockney Rebel, the Kinks. He nearly wept.<br /><br /><em>"What did you do before They took over," </em>Jethro asked, balancing his head on her breasts.<br /><br /><em>"I ran my own boutique,"</em> she sighed, drawing deep on her Silk Cut. <em>"South American fabrics, Mayan calendars, panpipes, bowler hats, that sort of thing. Then the Board of Trade came round and restocked us with pre-frayed cardigans, <strong>Goblin Teasmades</strong>, meerschaum pipes and pomade. I kept the bowler hats, but sold up once they ran out."</em><br /><br />Jethro mused that CAMRA wasn't wrong all the time.<br /><br /><em>"I've been sort of drifting since then,"</em> she continued unbidden. <em>"I do some black market highlighting, the <strong>Belfast lingerie run</strong>. How about you?"<br /><br />"I've just burned my bridges,</em>" he began. <em>"Proposed turning a grim Brit war film into a saucy romp. Well, it did have <strong>Liz Fraser</strong> in it."<br /><br />"That was 'Desert Mice',"</em> Marianne added. <em>"You mean <strong>Sylvia Syms</strong>."</em><br /><br />Jethro felt clammy. He tried to sit up, but the <strong>breasts held him fast</strong>. <em>"How did you know I was working on 'Ice Cold in Alex'?"</em><br /><br />Marianne paused, then released him. <em>"Don't worry, they just want a word, that's all."</em><br /><br />The bathroom door creaked open, and in ambled a Porter Police patrol in crumpled corduroy. <em>"A beard in your earhole, old chap,"</em> grinned the commander.<br /><br />Jethro stared at Marianne. <em>"I'm sorry,"</em> she sobbed. <em>"But they had Baileys."</em>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-83541673906180269202012-03-01T09:59:00.006+00:002012-03-02T00:13:37.977+00:00The Hendrix Hundreds<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-607oGmPRq9g/T1AG4WhNkdI/AAAAAAAAAw8/QTtNGG7b68U/s1600/jimi.jpg" style="font-style: normal; "><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-607oGmPRq9g/T1AG4WhNkdI/AAAAAAAAAw8/QTtNGG7b68U/s200/jimi.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715075492320481746" /></a><i>"You're on now, Mr Bendix!"<br /><br />"Hendrix,"</i> Jimi muttered for the hundredth time, which meant they'd been getting it wrong on average five times a year since he arrived.<br /><br />Jimi shouldered his axe and edged past the pint pots to the tiny corner stage.<br /><br /><i>"The Bontddu Hall Hotel is proud to present Jimmy Bendrix's Experiences,"</i> coughed the manager into the squawk of dust and feedback.<br /><br /><i>"Hi, croeso cynnes, I'm Jimi Hendrix, out of Washington. That's Washington State, in the US Northwest, not Washington on your Tyne. Whay aye, maaaan."</i><br /><br />Silence.<br /><br /><i>"Yeah, uh, here's something from way back. Perhaps some of you remember it. I've got some tapes, if you, uh. It's called 'All Along the Watchtower'."<br /><br />"Bloody Jehovah's Witnesses!"</i> came a voice from the bar. Some laughter.<br /><br /><i>"Yeah, uh, cheers, diolch. So, uh, here it goes...."</i><br /><br />----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><i>"You want to warm them up with some 'Streets of London' or something before your own stuff, bobol bach! Give them a fucking chance, innit?" </i>The manager crammed some twenties into Jimi's NCB donkey jacket pocket. <i>"You driving home?"</i><br /><br /><i>"Uh, no. Gwenllian's picking me up in the Cortina."<br /><br />"Have a nightcap on the house then. Shame not to. You must be parched."<br /><br />"Half of lager, if that's ok. Not the Wrexham, though."<br /><br />"No problemo."</i><br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><i>"Go ok, love?"<br /><br />"Sure. Some of them dug 'Foxy Lady'. Rest were pretty polite."</i><br /><br />They clattered over the Penmaenpool Toll Bridge and headed for the coast. Jimi liked the long way back to Borth, so he could hear the waves and catch a gust of salt air with the windows down, even through the rain.<br /><br /><i>"Meic's got a new record out. I taped it. Fancy a listen?"<br /><br />"Meic Stevens? Sure, why not."</i><br /><br />Gwenllian fumbled with the stereo. A guitar struck up, and the tight, familiar voice cut through the dark in Welsh:<br /><br /><i>"See the fire in the still of the night, and smoke on the chilly breeze?... Must we pray with the Living Dead?... Too many vampires, everywhere... don't turn against your own blood..."</i><br /><br />Jimi's head rolled down on his chin, his eyes fluttered.<br /><br />-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><i>"Good idea to go up country, chance to get my head straight."<br /><br />"I thought the Cardiff gig went well."<br /><br />"Engelbert fucking Humperdinck, man. What was that? Backstage he told me I should go for an opera name too - no one will ever get 'Hendrix' right. I told him to announce me as 'Madame Butterfly'. Fat prick."<br /><br />"Chill, man. Look, we're coming up to Aberystwyth now. There's some great blokes I'd like you to meet, they've got their own scene going."<br /><br />"OK, let's drive."</i><br /><br />-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br /><i>"Mike?"<br /><br />"No, Meic. Ah, there's not much in it. Have a drink first?"<br /><br />"Sure. What's that you've got there?"<br /><br />"Red wine. Pretty rank, mind. The bitter here's ok."<br /><br />"I'll stick to the lager beer, thanks. Cheers."</i><br /><br />Gwenllian brought over the drinks as Meic and his friends struck up.<br /><br /><i>"So you guys do your stuff in Gaelic?"</i> Jimi asked afterwards, rolling a fat one.<br /><br /><i>"Welsh - fewer vowels, but more people,"</i> grinned Mike. <i>"Like a smoke, do you? We grow something special out here in the woods, blow your mind it will."<br /><br />"I'm listening,"</i> grinned Jimi.<br /><br /><i>"'shrooms, man. Don't have to plant them, just keep your eyes open and your nose to the ground. Not hard for us, like. Once you've gone 'cap' you don't go black, if you don't mind me saying!"</i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"Just show me where it's at."</i><br /><br />------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />The sharp bend at Aberdovey jolted Jimi awake. Across the estuary a corpse candle beckoned the unwary to Borth.<br /><br /><i>"Jesus, that brought it all back!"<br /><br />"What d'you mean?"</i> Gwenllian changed down a gear and the sea scent receded.<br /><br /><i>"I was back in the summer of '67, when I first came up here, after the Cardiff gig. Bottom of the bill at The Capitol, behind Cat Stevens. Heh, never thought that would be me saying goodbye to the big time!"<br /><br />"You miss it, don't you?"<br /><br />"Dunno, I guess. I see those guys, you know, Clapton, those guys, and I think, shit, that's just the basic blues they're doing, year in year out. <span class="st">In the mountains, there you feel free, you dig? I'm laying stuff down for the grandkids. Maybe they'll get it, you know? Fragments, shored </span><span class="st">against my ruins."<br /><br />"You what? The stuff you record down in Talybont with those stoners, on their eight-track?"</span></i></div><div><span class="st"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"Five-track, if it's working."</i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st"><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st">They smiled as the car crossed the Dyfi and tacked back along the shore. </span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st"><br /></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"You ever hear the bells out there?"</i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"The Bells of Aberdovey? Don't be daft. it's just a petrified forest, like on the planet of the Daleks."</i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><i><span class="st">"Yeah, </span><span class="st">I do not think they will ring to me. I reckon they ring to Meic, though, don't you? You hear it in his music?"</span></i></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st"><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st">Silence.</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st"><br /></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"You miss him, don't you?"</i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st"><br /></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"No! it's just, just that he's doing stuff, got records coming out, got his own company, you know? You could be doing that, instead of this - busking."</i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"What we're laying down, Gwen, it's -"</i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st"><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span style="font-size: 100%; ">Silence. They drove on. Borth came up in the near distance, the sea close on their right. The Moon lit up the fringes of his hair.</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div><i>"You tired, babe?"</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>"I like our life, Jim, I do. I like our caravan, the t-shirt printing, the market stall in Aber, the pot in the oil drum, the hunting of the 'shrooms up the Rheidol. I do. It's just that sometimes -"</i></div><div><span class="st"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"I meant, you tired of driving?"</i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"It's not far."</i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span class="st"><i>"Let me take the wheel, you rest a while".</i></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><span class="st"><br /></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">Jimi walked around the car, and Gwenllian slid across to the passenger side. He breathed in the night air. By the time he'd settled at the wheel, she was asleep.</div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">Jimi slipped the tape out of the stereo and back into its case. He fished in a pocket for one of his own, and set it to play. He carried Gwenllian out and lay her down in the dunes, then steered the car onto the beach. </div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /></div><div style="font-style: normal; ">The wheels sank down gently, but soon gained purchase as he struck out <span style="font-size: 100%; ">seaward towards the Atlantic waves.</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; "><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-13464081335034629972012-02-23T10:03:00.006+00:002012-02-23T11:13:13.201+00:00Anti-Danube: Chapter X<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BaeJazWh8V4/T0YZ4Wr-37I/AAAAAAAAAww/bKDYKljKiqM/s1600/Allingham.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 220px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5712281633319477170" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BaeJazWh8V4/T0YZ4Wr-37I/AAAAAAAAAww/bKDYKljKiqM/s320/Allingham.jpg" /></a><em><strong>By way of Introduction: </strong>Some years have passed since the last chapter of Anti-Danube appeared in English. For previous sections, see </em><a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.com/2008/10/anti-danube-lavenir-dure-longtemps.html"><em>here</em></a><em> and </em><a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.com/2008/10/anti-danube-chapter-ix.html"><em>here</em></a><em>.</em><br /><br /><em>As this month sees the centenary of the <strong>Ruthenian Moonshiners Uprising </strong>of 1912 against the Austro-Hungarian Temperance League, it seems appropriate to resume the autobiographical novel shortly after where we left off. </em><br /><br /><em>Probationary Agent Yizhak Zhatko (nationality - poet) is having to interrogate Agent Agent Kafka (his real name) over the disruption of a folk concert that they were meant to be guarding. The event was voted the <strong>most popular act of sabotage </strong>in the People's Popular Democratic Republic of Ruthenia that year, beating even the collision of a steak lorry with a mobile red wine dispenary in the village of Bragg.<br /><br />Zhatko sets out the chapter in the form of a transcript, which has the virtue of <strong>sparing the reader his prose style</strong>, but not mine.</em><br /><br /><br /><strong>Chapter X: In Which Socialism is Threatened by Dissident Reality </strong><br /><br /><em>(Protocols of the interrogation of Agent Agent Kafka, conducted by Probationary Agent Yizhak Zhatko, at <strong>NAKRO Secret Police Chief Headquarters</strong>, "The Cellars", Former Castle Jurex, August 199- ) </em><br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Well, Agent Agent Kafka, The Organs have asked me to question you about what happened at Zhakhiv Cultural Agitational Facility No.17 the other day.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Was Hungarians.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko]</em> <strong>So-called Hungarians</strong>?<br /><br /><em>[Kafka]</em> No. This time real Hungarians. Ha ha - Kafka joke.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Hmm. You may recall that we were observing a concert by former Ruthenian musical-vocal ensembles <em>Kava Break</em> and <em>Izotop</em>.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Kafka focked them!<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko]</em> Yes, that's true - so much so that we had to requisition the articulated lorry the Central Committee uses to move Comrade First (General-)Secretary K. Novak around, because the musicians' <strong>weeping, swollen orbs</strong> would not fit through the doors of the prison van, despite quantitative easing with shovels.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>They are womanly men! I void myself on the <strong>boar that mounted their sister</strong>, also on their sister, and on the dung that eased their congress-<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko, interrupting] </em>The chief medical officer of Depravnik State Penal Isolator Unit agrees that <em>"womanly men"</em> accurately describes the musicians' <em>"transitional state of pelvic alteration"</em>. Colonel Nadroth asked me to congratulate you on this surgical breakthrough before the formal interrogation begins, in case you prove unappreciative afterwards.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka, maudlin] </em>Colonel like distant step-father to me.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Indeed. Colonel Nadroth was pleased in particular that you achieved this without formal medical training. This will help promote the <strong>People's Self-Medication Programme </strong>at the forthcoming Party Congress, involving as this does the reorganisation of all hospitals and nursing homes into grain silos.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka, cheered up] </em>I redouble effort!<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>The Colonel and other responsible agencies were also impressed with your dual-use of gardening tools and a type of lizard-<br /><br /><em>[Kafka, interrupting]</em> - incorrect fact. Was <strong>large termites</strong>.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko]</em> - thank you - and a selection of patriotic forest insects in this protracted and highly invasive procedure, which will encourage the outgoing medical practitioners to surrender their scalpels, kidney dishes and fillings for the People's Popular Armed Forces war-drive prior to their <strong>fair trial and execution</strong>.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka]</em> Termite - friend of working man. And of working bear.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Quite. Colonel Nadroth does note, however, that <strong>transitional gender status</strong> is <em>"objectively bourgeois"</em>, and has therefore asked that <em>"promotion of decadence (non-literary)"</em> should be added to your formal charge sheet if, as it is hoped, you or anyone else confesses to being a monarchist wrecker or otherwise a connoisseur of non-gourd-based music.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Oh.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Moving back to the evening in question, the alleged concert was attacked by dynasto-deviationists, hyper-nationalists, anarcho-Trotskyites, agraro-revisionists, the Latto faction of the Democratic Rhomboid, Continuity Langerites, the Shutak List (Renewal), so-called Hungary and - as we can testify - some pork tapeworms, under the parasol of the <strong>League of the Wives of Dr Bohdan Naxajlo</strong>.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Whores!<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Later, perhaps. To continue. The assailants broadcast the former Royalist anthem of the former regime, <em>"Hey Ruteni, masluy mi sztifli!" (<strong>"O Ruthenians, Oil My Boots!"</strong>)</em>, tainted five quarts of slyvovytz with red snapper, left a hornpipe wedged inside Zhakhiv Urban-Rural District Local Party Secretary <em>"Blind"</em> Iancu, and defiled a banner espousing Scientific Socialism with saltpetre and pre-revolutionary orthography.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Blind Iancu's brother, <strong>Mad Iancu</strong>, countersigned Kafka's first arrest warrant. It was for Kafka's parents. Kafka feel for Blind Iancu.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Duly noted. But Colonel Nadroth, the Supreme Higher Party Council of Organs, both Iancus and History Itself demand to know how these revanchists managed all of this and yet vanished into the night undetected.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Zhakhiv Public Order Militiamen blind, mad or have no leg. Iancus promote freaks, hope to win State Prize for abolition of local hospital and lunatic asylum, build People's Space Rocket out of <strong>salvaged manacles</strong>.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko]</em> Socialism leaves no room for doubt, Agent Kafka, and Communism will leave no rooms at all. We shall tear down the four walls and outhouses of convention and romp free on the riverbanks of creativity. In the meantime, however, we remain tethered to the <strong>leaden buoy of probability</strong>, and that suggests that the League of the Wives had someone on the inside of the concert working for them. I fear that Colonel Nadroth hopes it might be you.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka]</em> Why is?<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>The true origins of his suspicions are beyond our feeble, polyester-uniformed reasoning, Kafka, but I do know that Special Agent Tschtjetz is waiting outside the door with a weather balloon, a tub of schmaltz and some fish hooks. He is writing <em>"Kafka"</em> on the balloon in your wife's lipstick, and laughing like a <strong>Cossack in a convent bathtub</strong>.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka, animated] </em>Kafka just remember! Have important information about Naxajlovite deviant 6th columnist at concert.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Excellent! Let me wind-up the recording engine and dust off some fresh shellac...<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Regret to inform that this information is for ears of full agent of NAKRO alone. Comrade Probationary Agent Zhatko is only probationary agent, therefore not yet ideologically refined enough to hear details of dissident thought without danger of straying into <strong>wrecking mentality</strong>. Permission to have report heard by Special Agent Zhloba Tschtjetz!<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Granted, I suppose. <em>[winds open door]</em> Special Agent Tschtjetz, Agent Agent Kafka has a report to make about the Zhakhiv Cultural Agitational Facility No.17 anti-popular reactionary cabal, for your <strong>remaining ear </strong>only.<br /><br /><em>[Tschtjetz, wheeling in a trestle of sharpened plumbing attachments and a sack of ammonium]</em> Right, Zhatko, plug this pump in over there and start <strong>wrapping the sandpaper</strong>-<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko, interrupting]</em> A field report, Special Agent Tschtjetz, not a confession.<br /><br /><em>[Tschtjetz]</em> Don't worry, sunshine, it'll be a confession by the time they <strong>unwind him </strong>from those railings-<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko, interrupting again]</em> No, it really is a field report. I'll get some ersatz tea, shall I?<br /><br /><em>[Tschtjetz]</em> Yeah, which will, by the dialectically-approved theories of Lamarck, had better have turned into slyvovytz by the time it gets here, <strong>you Carpathian trouser-press</strong>! Now, Kafka, what's going on?<br /><br /><em>[Kafka]</em> Well, comrade... <em>[door closes]</em><br /><br /><em>(Six minutes pass)<br /></em><br /><br /><br /><p><em></em></p><br /><p><em>(Protocols of the interrogation of Probationary Agent Yizhak Zhatko [suspended - literally], conducted by Agent Agent Kafka, Special Agent Zhloba Tschtjetz, <strong>Progressive Woodland Ranger Bodjo the Largely-Tamed Bear</strong>, a wild boar [unspecified], and NAKRO Chairman Colonel Nadroth, at NAKRO Secret Police Chief Headquarters, "The Cellars", Former Castle Jurex, August 199- )</em> </p><em>[Tschtjetz] </em>Well, Traitor Grade III Zhatko, The Organs have received a confidential NAKRO field report that you were the revanchist grouplet that disrupted that concert of <strong>Turk-loving danglyboys</strong> the other day!<br /><br />It's not looking good for you, Zhatko. Bodjo here's lonely, and so is Mr Snouty <em>[ed. possibly the wild boar, but could be reference to Tschtjetz's regenerative member, which he usually dubs <strong>"Captain Power Eel"</strong>]</em>. Now let's see how fast and loud you can confess without the balloon coming out again, shall we?<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko, with some emotion] </em>Agent Agent Kafka, I don't mind telling you that I feel let down by your behaviour.<br /><br /><em>[Kafka] </em>Kafka not let Traitor Grade III down, at least not until fish hooks snap.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko]</em> Very well, I confess that I, a traitor-<br /><br /><em>[Tschtjetz]</em> Grade III, dammit - it's important for our key performance indicators this quarter.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>Yes, yes, Grade III - I did knowlingly and with counter-revolution aforethought cause rotten liberalism to damage the fabric of society and a progressive banner sewn by the inmates of the <strong>Panda-Eyed Waifs Orphanage</strong>, Skargil District.<br /><br />I also occasioned the performance of the former royalist anthem, misused state reserves of Greek Fire for non-recreational purposes and incited a riot by <strong>gum-cheeked peasants</strong>.<br /><br />I deny the charge of tampering with the food, as that's just the way they like it in Zhakhiv.<br /><br />In mitigation, I would like The Organs to bear in mind that I did stop the performances by the musical-vocal ensembles <em>Kava Break</em> and <em>Izotop</em>.<br /><br /><em>[Tschtjetz] </em>Your plea for mitigation will be <strong>noted, distorted, and used against you </strong>on the first episode of <em>"The People's Pillory"</em>, a television programme that will replace the courts under the forthcoming <em>"Judiciary Reform (Abolition of Legal System) Bill"</em>. Agent Agent Kafka, inform Colonel Nadroth!<br /><br /><em>[Colonel Nadroth, who is standing behind Tschtjetz, rolls his eyes, perhaps from the smoke curling from his Karbin filter-tip] </em><br /><em><br />[Kafka] </em>Prisoner confessed, Comrade Colonel, and we didn't have to divert electric from village this time. <em>"Economy is Not Just a Swear Word,"</em> like Party said.<br /><br /><em>[Colonel Nadroth]</em> I see. Well, Zhatko, this is a surprise. I thought you might have accused the <strong>ultra-nationalist turncoat Slavislav Kodoba</strong>, whom we have been holding in that crate over there for this very purpose, but then there's still room for one more inside. Anything else you'd like to confess to? There's space on the back of your file, you know.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko]</em> I would further like to bring to the Citizen Colonel's attention that I, a Traitor Grade III (definition - did not destroy personal property of senior officials, <strong>owns no livestock</strong>), infiltrated the ranks of the NAKRO security police in contravention of Law #13,480 of 1953 <em>"On the Prohibition of Traitors' Infiltration of the Ranks of the NAKRO Security Police"</em>.<br /><br /><em>[Nadroth, looks angrily from Tschtjetz to Kafka, and back again. Then, when this fails to elicit a response, <strong>hits both of them with a chair</strong>] </em>No! This also means that NAKRO itself violated Law #13,481 of 1953 <em>"On the Prevention of Traitors' Infiltration of the Ranks of the NAKRO Security Police"</em>, which states specifically in Article 1 that <em>"NAKRO Security Police Agents are to prevent traitors' infiltration of their ranks, on pain of being demoted from rank of Agent to that of Traitor Grade II (definition - did not damage personal property of senior officials, owns some livestock)"</em>. This, like Zhatko right now, cannot stand.<br /><br />Comrade Zhatko - a cigarette? Oh, yes, lips still don't fit - anyway, NAKRO will have your sentence in the Concert Affair commuted from eventual death to community service, such as checking that the <strong>lingerie imported from Gaullist France </strong>for the staff of the Central Committee's Physiotherapy Clinic fits properly.<br /><br />In return, we will cascade the paperwork in the Infiltration Affair to Agent Agent Kafka as part of his Elementary Literacy Course homework. That should keep it away from The Organs, until Control Department Secretary Razvjorstka develops some advanced <strong>crayon decryption skills</strong>.<br /><br />There, I think that went rather well. Now, Tschtjetz, please lower Comrade Zhatko, for he has work to do. Under his guidance the workers, peasants and progressive managerial echelons must clench their matted palms into <strong>one, six-fingered fist </strong>of vengeance against the Naxajlovite Latifundistas, and that calls for further training.<br /><br /><em>[Zhatko] </em>May I keep the schmaltz, Comrade Colonel? Breakfast seems a long time ago.<br /><br /><em>[Nadroth, patting him on the nose] </em>You people! Oh, and Tschtjetz - deflate that thing and switch the other stuff off too, would you? But not before giving Bodjo and that boar something to play with. <strong>Kafka will do.</strong><br /><br /><em>[Kafka]</em> (indistinct)No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-88678712786694811392012-02-08T12:19:00.006+00:002012-02-08T18:15:36.522+00:00Judicium Dei<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YdAjna1F_pA/TzJxFOYjFQI/AAAAAAAAAwg/jd-kFZMLu8g/s1600/sand.jpeg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 294px; height: 171px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YdAjna1F_pA/TzJxFOYjFQI/AAAAAAAAAwg/jd-kFZMLu8g/s320/sand.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706748012406183170" border="0" /></a><div>I'm always on the look-out for ways to spice up my home life with Madame Boyo, so it was only a matter of time before I investigated <strong>witch trials </strong>and their possible rendering in a suburban setting.<br /><br />We have a pond and plenty of kindling nearby, but my eye was caught by the African tradition of <strong>ordeal by poison</strong>.<br /><br />From the steaming Casamance basin to the lung-clutching Malagasy highlands, suspected necromancers, Lutherans and those with fancy ways are presented with various lurid gourds and chrisms to consume before crowds of <strong>bat-eared loafers</strong>, schoolchildren and passing camera crews.<br /><br />If you disgorge tooth-flecked tapioca all over the rapt onlookers you're free to go, as your innocent gullet would not suffer the tainted tuber to pass. If you die in <strong>pus-gummed convulsions</strong>, God's Justice has been served. Everyone is happy, and not a barrister in sight.<br /><br />I have no intention of offering Madame Boyo calabar beans on toast or a buta-buta nut cutlet. <strong>She is Ukrainian</strong>, and can therefore eat the following with no ill effects:<br /></div><br /><ul><li><em>Salo </em>- fatback rind stuffed in <strong>the communal kippering shed </strong>since the war. Best taken with horseradish moonshine and a riding crop.</li><li><em>Kovbyk</em> - pigface in vinegar jelly. Tastes <strong>better on the way back up </strong>than on the way down, so make sure your bucket is handy.</li><li><em>Varenyky</em> - dough balls moulded round a cabbage and the pieces of pig left over from the above. Sometimes cooked, but it's hard to tell. Crimean Tatars use them in <strong>Sharia executions</strong>.</li><li><em>Kholodnyk</em> - take your kitchen composting bin, pour week-old milk on the contents and serve. <strong>Best arm yourself </strong>before offering it to strangers. And<br /></li><li><em>Bihos</em> - fill a hollow loaf of bread with three different types of rotting cabbage, add plums and any <strong>remaining pig</strong>. Place under your grandmother's bed. When it's ready she'll let you know, from one end or the other.</li></ul>So <strong>Gambian mambo beans </strong>are only likely to make Madame Boyo angry.<br /><div><br />There's a lot to be said for this direct African approach to rooting out deviants. Decades may have passed, but only now do I realise that the hospitality rained on me during my sojourn in <strong>Central Asia</strong> was a similar and rigorous rite of passage, a testing of my masticatory mettle. But, as is the way of the East, it was done subtly.<br /><br />Food is central to the Uzbek way of life, which ideally consists of <strong>sitting on a dais </strong>while your extended family rush around killing, cooking, skewering and serving up sheep in a variety of rice-based guises.<br /><br />Unlike their White Sheep Turcoman and <strong>Black Eye Kirghiz</strong> neighbours, the Uzbeks had enjoyed the use of houses, pots and tables long before the Russians turned up, and so developed a cuisine more complex than eating whatever you'd been riding lately.<br /><br />So literally all-consuming is their <em>gourmanderie</em> that Uzbeks looked at a pair of <strong>sinuous Arabo-Persian words</strong> meaning <em>"food"</em>, blinked slowly, then slapped them together like a pair of hams to emphasise how much they like dinner (<em>"oziq-ovqat"</em>).<br /><br />And so highly do Uzbeks revere <strong>mutton pilaf </strong>that they refer to it simply as <em>"osh"</em> - <em>"food"</em>. Like the ethereal beings in Calvino's <em>"Invisible Cities"</em> who will not place profane foot on the hallowed avenues of their citadels, the Uzbeks don't bid friends to eat the pilaf without any ceremony, but rather first invite them to admire its gleaming perfection - <em>"oshga qarang!"</em><br /><br />A visitor can aspire to the status of <em>"guest"</em> only if he <strong>honours the pilaf</strong>.<br /></div><br /><ul><li>He must eat it with the right hand in an elegant scooping motion, having first allowed the host's eldest son to bejewel the dish with gouts of <strong>choicest mutton fat</strong>. </li><li>He must sip the <strong>green tea </strong>steadily, but never drain the dainty bowl. </li><li>He must <strong>eat heartily</strong>, but not clear the plate. </li></ul><br /><div>Once the meal is over, a few questions about the particular variety of pilaf marks the guest out as an acolyte of the<span style="font-style: italic;"> "oshpaz"</span> (pilaf chef) and allows access to the back table at the teahouse - the one near the door to the <strong>opium den</strong>. And to pass through that particular portal takes another half-century or so of bobbing and blinking over mounds of foggy, foggy stew.<br /><br />Myself, I was happy to rest right there on the pilgrim path and savour the unique <strong>harmony with inertia</strong> that comes from being an Uzbek. Freud never travelled to the Oxus, which is a shame, as the locals provide ample evidence for his oft-derided concept of Nirvana:<br /><br />They seek a steady state of contentment rather than stimulation, in common with nuns and yokels, but manage to achieve it without abandoning the pleasures of the marital bed or teeth. Theirs is truly the <strong>Golden Section </strong>of the Silk Road.<br /><br />Old Soviet Hands weep with gratitude on encountering the Uzbeks' <strong>transcendent indifference</strong> to all things beyond their idle oases. No demands to know how much a St Albans taxi-driver earns, no speeches about <em>"Misty Albion"</em>, no suggestions that you marry their daughters - merely a polite enquiry about your hometown and whether you have pilaf there too, then off to lunch.<br /><br />This would apply to any <strong>Martian</strong> who landed on the banks of the Jaxartes as much as to the passing Welshman. <em>"So you don't have a mouth as such, Fleet Commadore Qʈħätɬʼ<span style="font-weight: bold;">ɯ</span>ŋ? Well that's fine, you can just admire the pilaf!"</em><br /><br />And sad to say <strong>that's as far as I got</strong>, thanks to an ill-considered attempt to adapt the Uzbek culinary code to interior design. </div><br />I used to rent a flat in Tashkent, the country's patchwork capital. My landlord, Big Rustam the Unreliable Attorney, would often drop by for a chat, and I began to spot signs that I might be invited to join the lotus-eaters at the back of the <span style="font-style: italic;">chaikhana</span>. Just the odd hint, but <span style="font-weight: bold;">full of dusty promise</span> - <span style="font-style: italic;">"Boyo-jon, there are some people I would like you to meet." "What do these people do?" "They do nothing, and they do it slowly."</span><br /><div><br />Hubris drove me down to the gentleman's outfitters at the racetrack to get cloaked, skullcapped and belted like a Bokharan Beau Brummell. But no aspirant to <span style="font-style: italic;">"O'zbekchilik"</span> can approach the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Wispy Beard of Wisdom</span> without at least a couple of dishes of <em>"kishmish" </em>- mixed nuts, raisins and sultanas - to welcome guests to his table.</div><br /><div>I'd had a heavy evening swapping Tajik jokes with Big Rustam (<span style="font-style: italic;">"Have you seen the second wife of Blind Sobir, the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Blind Sage of Soghd</span>? No? Well, neither has he!</span>"), and noticed a tart tang of tobacco and mutton on the morning air. Mrs Rustam was due to drop round that afternoon to count the dozens of lumpy quilts that made up her daughter's dowry, and I needed to freshen things up a bit.<br /><br />I set off for the Turkish supermarket on Atatürk Street. Apart from <span style="font-style: italic;">Barf</span> washing powder and <span style="font-style: italic;">Pif Paf</span> cockroach killer, this teetering outpost of the market economy stocked <span style="font-weight: bold;">delicate rosewater potpourri</span> for the homesick Anatolian <span style="font-style: italic;">Hausfrau</span>. I grabbed a bag and planted it in a bowl on the living-room table, before setting off on the monthly bribe run.<br /><br />That evening Big Rustam dropped by as usual. Now when it comes to <span style="font-style: italic;">sang froid</span>, Uzbeks can rival any Victorian fusilier facing <span style="font-weight: bold;">impalement</span> by <span style="font-style: italic;">impi</span>. A local colleague once dismissed the Kazakh nation with a cursory<span style="font-style: italic;"> "you can tell what they're thinking"</span>, so it takes some tuning to tease out what's made a <span style="font-style: italic;">Toshkentchi</span> tetchy. But I noticed the omens - he paused for a second before returning my greeting, and the vodka bottle in his hand was <span>Russian</span>.<br /><br />We sat down and weighed out the <span style="font-weight: bold;">usual exchanges</span> before Big Rustam asked <span style="font-style: italic;">"That bowl in your living room, what were you kind enough to put in it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Potpourri,"</span> I replied. <span style="font-style: italic;">"It is a Frankish frippery that may lend a room the <span style="font-weight: bold;">perfumes of Paradise</span>, if He wills it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"By the Merciful One, it is truly fragrant,"</span> Big Rustam noted, <span style="font-style: italic;">"But how would you <span style="font-weight: bold;">go about eating it</span>, by the grace of the All-Bountiful?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"In truth, only a beaver with the morning breath of a <span style="font-weight: bold;">Khujandi catamite </span>would relish such a dish,"</span> I continued, seeking to return last night's mirth with a jibe at our Tajik neighbours, their fey ways and fondness for trees. <span style="font-style: italic;">"For it is made of wood shavings soaked in bath oils"</span>.<br /><br />Big Rustam nodded, and the conversation turned to how his latest client had managed to garrotte himself with his <span style="font-weight: bold;">own scrotum</span> in the back of a police van, among other refinements of the Uzbek penal system. He would still drop round from time to time, but the visits became briefer and rarer, and the call to carouse at the back table never came.<br /><br />I accepted this with near-native nobility, but often wondered what <span style="font-weight: bold;">unwritten law</span> had I broken. Had I touched a flatbread with my knife? Had I passed something with my left hand? Had I forgotten to pour the tea back into the pot twice before serving? I could not say.<br /><br />Then one day I came home early to find <span style="font-weight: bold;">Mrs Rustam</span>, suitably chaperoned by her third son, sorting a sack of sheets in the spare room. I helped her haul a haversack of silks from atop the cupboard.<br /><br />She whispered a word of thanks, and her lips were <span style="font-weight: bold;">red with rosewood</span>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-24994572176237527222012-01-18T11:38:00.002+00:002012-01-18T12:01:49.638+00:00A Drunk Welshman Looks at the Thistle<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hpxsTi19kA8/TxLuQpjoAEI/AAAAAAAAAwI/5oqrUbJbvaQ/s1600/shetland.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 259px; height: 194px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hpxsTi19kA8/TxLuQpjoAEI/AAAAAAAAAwI/5oqrUbJbvaQ/s320/shetland.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5697878448377692226" border="0" /></a>One of the many services <span style="font-style: italic;">The Daily Mail</span> provides is a sort of rave environment for excitable Tory historians. One minute we have <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2054913/Europe-war-2018-As-Angela-Merkel-says-euro-meltdown-spark-battle.html">Dominic Sandbrook</a> deriving a little too much pleasure from the prospect of another European war, the next it's <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2066380/Will-World-War-III-U-S-China.html">"Max" Hastings</a> and visions of China <span style="font-weight: bold;">clattering its rice bowls</span> through the Outback.<br /><br />The latest and best comes from <span style="font-weight: bold;">shiny-faced Kiplingite</span> <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086465/Scottish-independence-referendum-What-Scotland-did-alone.html">Andrew Roberts</a>, who lives up to his flummery-stirring Welsh name with an nightmarish vision of horror that is an independent Scotland.<br /><br />Dr Roberts certainly puts the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Pollyanna Picts</span> in their place with a trim timeline that takes Scotland from the uxorious bosom of England to a freezing Chinese fiefdom in five paragraphs, shedding Shetlands and Highlands as it sinks into satrapy.<br /><br />Unlike his <span style="font-weight: bold;">beef-cheeked stablemates</span>, Roberts allows himself the odd jocularity: He coyly wonders why the Scots should scramble for freedom in 2014 before blithely slipping in a mention of <span style="font-style: italic;">"Britain's </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Prime Minister George Osborne"</span>.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the good doctor is clear that the only people in the world who might want an independent Scotland are <span style="font-weight: bold;">the Scots and the rest of Britain</span>, so that can never be allowed.<br /><br />This idea of <span style="font-style: italic;">"divide and rule"</span> has been cropping up everywhere since the Romans tried it on with the Greeks, and <span style="font-weight: bold;">we in Wales know it well</span>. The English have at various time essayed:<br /><br /><ul><li>The artificial division of Wales into North and South, whereas true tension teems between <span style="font-weight: bold;">land-dwellers and amphibians</span>;</li><li><span style="font-style: italic;">Irridenta</span> in Monmouthshire and the Welsh Marches, while the English Marches have little enough room for <span style="font-weight: bold;">footpads and rustlers</span> in Shrewsbury jail as it is;</li><li>The settlement of Flemings in Pembrokeshire and Normans in Radnor, Trustafarians in Trawsfynydd and Scousers in Rhyl, only for us to assimilate the first pair and couple the second to our <span style="font-weight: bold;">rude ploughs</span>; and</li><li>The cunning portage of <span style="font-weight: bold;">BBC Drama to Cardiff</span>. This, in a manner similar to the move of BBC wireless to the rickets-racked slums of Salford, was meant to sweep the Cambrian capital clean of tar-footed locals on a four-wheeled wave of <span>WC1 mediocrats</span>. </li></ul><div><br /></div><div>But our own glorious S4C television channel pre-empted this move through two decades of nurturing staff capable of braying about <span style="font-style: italic;">raclette</span> grills in three degrees of Welsh, thank you very much.<br /><br />So Wales endures, though Westminster still covets our petrified forests and <span style="font-weight: bold;">access to the gods</span>.<br /><br />The poor Scotchmen face a tougher task, for the English have noted that, like Lincolnshire, Scotland is divided into <span style="font-weight: bold;">three geometric parts</span>:<br /><br /><ul><li>The <span style="font-weight: bold;">Lowlands</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">"Lollards"</span> in the ancient Scotch tongue, are a truculent plateau of reeking cities and broken vessels, inhabited by the descendants of the more enterprising Geordie tribes;</li><li>The <span style="font-weight: bold;">Highlands and Islands</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">"Mickle Rourkes"</span>, make up a twilit thanage populated by giant flying insects, suicidal English <span style="font-style: italic;">"downsizers"</span> and the scions of Irish clans keener than most to share their religious disputes with deserving neighbours; and</li><li>The <span style="font-weight: bold;">Northern Isles</span>, or <span style="font-style: italic;">"Breeks"</span>, were a guano-caked graveyard for Viking longboats until John Knox expelled the entire female population of Scotland there for the sin of knitting <span style="font-style: italic;">("whereby they have weaven tootwixt the phibres of sheepe and fyshe in Babylonnian gaudie")</span>. These mated endlessly with Knut Baumann, the remaining Norse watchman, to produce a kelpie brood of peat-dowsers.</li></ul><br />A crypto-Celtic creature like Roberts has read a book or two as well as writing them, and knows the English can play the <span style="font-style: italic;">Teuchter</span> tectonic plates to their fey advantage. <span style="font-style: italic;">"You, I say, you there!" </span>they will wave in the general direction of the Highlands, <span style="font-style: italic;">"These Lollards will swap your <span style="font-weight: bold;">skirts, offal and homebrew</span> for 'track' suits, fried 'tatties' and opiates. They've done it to us - don't let them do it to you."</span><br /><br />This may not succeed, as Highlanders, like the Welsh, are suspicious of human contact. England may be on firmer ground, albeit not literally, with the <span style="font-weight: bold;">Orkney and Shetland </span>islanders - or <span style="font-style: italic;">"Arcadians and Shedsevens"</span> as they put it in their putty-lipped pretence at Danish.<br /><br />The Northern Isles have historic links with Norway, in that the Norsemen got rid of them as a dowry for one of the pallid child brides their royalty would send Scotwards in leaky boats. And the Roberts Gambit is based entirely on the Orkneys and Shetlands' escaping from the clutches of Fu Man Salmond into <span style="font-weight: bold;">Oslo's rollmop embrace</span>.<br /><br />This all depends on whether the Norwegians want the Isles. After all, they already have enough oil to provide a <span style="font-weight: bold;">tugboat for every troll</span>, and more crinkly coastline, gamey sweaters and bad-tempered fish than modesty requires.<br /><br />Nor do the Northern Isles have much else to recommend them to prospective conquerors. The modern Shetlands and equally unappealing Orkneys are little more than a dreary pointer for <span style="font-weight: bold;">bum-crazed Russian trawlermen</span> that Aberdeen and its ample supply of raw spirits, non-seagull-based cuisine and bipedal womenfolk are not far away.<br /><br />The nearby Faroe Islanders have virtually no booze or telly, speak a cleft-palate form of Norse, and club whales to death with their own <span style="font-weight: bold;">weirdly misshapen members</span> for entertainment of a rare summer evening. Yet they have a government and distinct culture.<br /><br />What do the Northern Isles have? <span style="font-weight: bold;">Single nostrils</span>, the odd auk, swan-guzzling tunesmith Sir Peter Maxwell Davis and the occasional burning boat. Their habit of voting Liberal-Democrat hasn't looked so cute since the coalition government took over in Westminster, either.<br /><br />Before applying for admission as Norway's second overseas empire, the Isles might ponder why Norway can't be bothered to wrest the <span style="font-weight: bold;">fun-loving Faroes</span> from Danish hands in the first place.<br /><br />In short, there is little evidence that Oslo would want to take on <span style="font-weight: bold;"> Scotland's dangliest archipelago</span>.<br /><br />My guess is that an independent Scotland would hold together fine. Bear in mind that, however inept its government might be, all Europe, much of Britain and some of the larger beasts will lend Scotland every assistance for the sheer devilry of <span style="font-weight: bold;">annoying the Tory Party</span>. Who knows, Scotland may one day rival the Isle of Man as the Celts' least chaotic polity.<br /><br />As for the Orkney and Shetland, despite the disadvantages that geography, eugenics and the fickle Christian god have rained upon their salty skulls, they will always find a way of using that <span style="font-weight: bold;">direct line to Ragnarǫk</span>.<br /><br />A friend once told me of a government decision to start charging schools in the Northern Isles postage for sending their <span style="font-weight: bold;">examination papers to Edinburgh </span>for marking. There were complaints, so the Scottish Office agreed that they could send the papers to the nearest city for free and then the government would pay postage from there.<br /><br />So the local schools posted all their exam papers off to the nearest city. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Bergen.</span><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-33430824870103703472012-01-04T12:49:00.007+00:002012-01-18T09:38:04.168+00:00Away with the Numbers<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eF-hAwClfMI/TwRM75nRGbI/AAAAAAAAAv8/KMmj26arEoc/s1600/jessop.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 147px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eF-hAwClfMI/TwRM75nRGbI/AAAAAAAAAv8/KMmj26arEoc/s320/jessop.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5693760420864661938" border="0" /></a>The eclipse suffered by the ideas of Carl Jung can be attributed to the toxic endorsement they received in the album <i>"<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/synchronicity-r15509/review">Synchronicity</a>"</i> by <b>rock albatross Sting</b> and his chums The Police.<div><br /></div><div>Like all youths of the time, I knew someone who had heard the album and decided that it spoke to them in a new and urgent way. In the case of Andy Summer's <span style="font-style: italic;">Psycho</span> tribute <span style="font-style: italic;"></span><i>"<a href="http://youtu.be/9NpvZ68EIgA">Mother</a>"</i>, this was true. Otherwise it was simply <b>Singa-Longa-Steppenwolf</b>.</div><div><br /></div><div>This pained me, as I'd been introduced to Jung by an avid female practitioner from Argentina. Her husband was a <b>German dwarf called Klaus</b>, with whom I sang bass-baritone in an amateur Swansea choir. </div><div><br /></div><div>Klaus had a crisply deprecating manner about others and a robust attitude to questions of social and political order that enlivened our post-practice collegial chats, rather as if a <b>wolverine</b> had been released at a Quaker meeting.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"I will send our son Reinhardt to military school!"</i> he <b>barked thoughtfully</b> after a bumpy run through <i>"Beata Viscera"</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>"We don't really have them here, except for the Sandhurst prep school,"</i> I ventured after a common-room silence. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>"The results on the <b>British society</b> of this omission are evident!"</i> Klaus added. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>"Letting military men teach toddlers hasn't done Argentina much good, though, has it? I mean, the Dirty War and all that,"</i> countered our choirmaster.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"The Dirty War? <b>I salute the Dirty War!</b>"</i> Klaus sprang to his feet and bumped his head on the coffee table, bringing the evening to an end.</div><div><br /></div><div>Klaus was a man of disarming candour and principle. Despite his <b>itchy politics</b>, he had a droll and trusting manner.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Mrs Klaus was a slut.</b> Once her husband had left for a long day countering Communism at the local cattle-feed plant, dropping Young Reinhardt at a glumly pacific playgroup en route, she would shake out her edible underwear and await gentleman callers on the couch.</div><div><br /></div><div>Like Klaus she was of unavoidable German extraction, but her <i>mitteleuropäisch</i> malady was not militarism but The Mind. I had a liaison with her that verged on the Platonic, in that we exchanged snatches of philosophical intercourse between raw bouts of <b>hog-eyed rutting</b>.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"So, do you find <b>Jung's calibration of the Erotic</b> over-schematic or compelling in its teleological drive?"</i> she exhaled one dusty morning.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"Dunno,"</i> I replied. <i>"I'm a student in early 1980s Britain, so in terms of politics I'm either going to be a Bolshevik booster or a date-rapist in a 'Hang Nelson Mandela!' t-shirt. Either way I'm not going to have much of an opinion about <b>some Chinaman</b>. Now, can we get any more mileage out of this corset?"</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Mrs Thatcher's retrieval of the Falkland Islands soon toppled the Argentine junta and ushered in a government committed to electrifying the popular imagination rather than trade unionists' sphincters, so it was only a matter of time before the <b>Man from Interpol</b> came calling for the Klauses.</div><div><br /></div><div>Mrs Klaus (we were never close) left me a <b>PO box number in Asunción</b> and a copy of <i>"Das Gesetz der Serie"</i> by Paul Kammerer. This slender volume formed her second and more successful attempt to turn me on to Jung.</div><div><br /></div><div>The hapless Hapsburgian Herr Dr Kammerer is known for an experiment on salamanders that suggested the theory of natural selection was missing a link of two. Although lionised by the Lamarckian opponents of Darwinism, he took his own life when it looked like the salamanders had been <span style="font-weight: bold;">interfered with</span> - albeit not in the 1950s <span style="font-style: italic;">News of The World</span> sense.<br /><br />There is still debate as to whether he forged his results, some Nazis tampered with them to embarrass the Communist Kammerer, or he simply drew the wrong conclusions. My own view as an arts graduate and lover of the Gothic is that no good ever comes from <span style="font-weight: bold;">meddling with toads</span>, as panfuls of Lancastrian witches' ashes might testify.<br /><br />Kammerer's work on coincidence in <span style="font-style: italic;">"The Law of the Series"</span> is more interesting, dealing as it does with chin-stroking strangeness and charming anecdote rather than <span style="font-weight: bold;">rubbing newts </span>against your trousers, if that is indeed what he did.<br /><br />Non-Teutons can read all about Kammerer in <span style="font-style: italic;">"<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Midwife-Toad-Arthur-Koestler/dp/0091082609">The Case of the Midwife Toad</a>"</span> by fellow <span style="font-weight: bold;">Danubian oddball </span>Arthur Koestler, as <span style="font-style: italic;">"Das Gesetz"</span> has never been translated. But its gist is that coincidences tend to bunch together, and may be manifestations of some as-yet-undefined series of phenomena.<br /><br />Koestler provides a neat selection of Herr Doktor's notes and some of his own - he said he was subjected to a <span style="font-style: italic;">"meteor shower"</span> of coincidences while writing the book - and <span style="font-weight: bold;">Jung </span>drew on it for his own book <span style="font-style: italic;">"Synchronicity"</span>.<br /><br />I thought little more about it until we went on holiday to Sardinia last autumn. Over dinner at a local <span style="font-style: italic;">Gastronomia</span> I recounted MR James's <span style="font-style: italic;">"<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB11l54HBbw">Number 13</a>" </span>to our daughter Arianrhod. This ghost story concerns a <span style="font-weight: bold;">spectral room </span>in a Danish inn and its alarming inhabitants, who disturb the repose of a pernickety English antiquarian.<br /><br />Arianrhod was taken with the tale, sharing as she does the <span style="font-weight: bold;">taste for the macabre </span>that spices all good children's literature. On the way home, as lightning darted through the pines, she retold the story in her usual way, replacing the protagonists with her little chums and adding elaborate costume directions.<br /><br />But there were some more novel alterations. She moved the scene to China, and the leprous room became <span style="font-weight: bold;">Number Four</span>. The telling took us all the way home to count the rooms carefully before retiring to bed.<br /><br />The following afternoon I found a quiet half hour to relax on the roof terrace with a six-pack and a paperback, in this case Philip Kerr's <span style="font-style: italic;">"</span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com/2009/04/phillip-kerrs-shot-forgotten-friday.html">The Shot</a><span style="font-style: italic;">"</span> - a pungent chunk of <span style="font-weight: bold;">shamus Stilton </span>about JFK, Castro and Da Mob. While leafing along I wondered why Arianrhod had chosen China and that particular number. She has a Chinese friend, it's true, but why Number Four?<br /><br />Then I turned the page and read how the assassin had marked a copy of Time magazine bearing JFK's portrait with the character <span style="font-style: italic;">四</span>. This, it emerged, is the number four in Mandarin and Cantonese, and <span style="font-weight: bold;">highly inauspicious</span> too. Hotels and blocks of flats in China avoid allocating rooms that feature it, just like the number 13 over here.<br /><br />The reason for its unfortunate associations is that it sounds rather like (<span style="font-style: italic;">死</span>), the character meaning <span style="font-style: italic;">"death"</span>. And so, to summarise:<br /><br /><ul><li>I told my five-year-old daughter a story about a cursed room, <span style="font-weight: bold;">number 13</span>.</li><li>Without any knowledge of oriental numerology on either of our parts, she then retold the tale in a Chinese setting, replacing the number 13 with the Chinese <span style="font-weight: bold;">number four</span>.</li><li>The next day I picked up a thriller and almost immediately read that four in China is as <span style="font-weight: bold;">unlucky </span>as 13 in the West.</li></ul>Arianrhod says she and her Chinese playmate never discuss such esoterica, being content with the mundanity of <span style="font-weight: bold;">unicorns</span>, fairies and minor royalty.<br /><br />I read a little more about Chinese numbers when we returned home, and was startled to find that the number seven is often associated with ghosts. The <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ghost Festival</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">鬼月</span>) is held in the seventh month of the traditional calendar, for example.<br /><br />One of the further oddities of Arianrhod's story had been that the room next to number four was neither five nor three, but specifically <span style="font-weight: bold;">number seven</span>.<br /><br />I was going to make this my <span style="font-weight: bold;">Christmas ghost story</span>, but the tale of Prince Llywelyn and his premature ressurrection came first. I made a start before the New Year, and took it up again on returning home from work last night.<br /><br />In the meantime a late greeting card had arrived with a Swansea post mark. Klaus is back.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-7504026820867249572011-12-22T15:55:00.007+00:002011-12-24T10:54:39.007+00:00Uneasy rolls the head<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IdjWv3BiZ50/TvNVP10PlmI/AAAAAAAAAvY/XBCDxiYt3HU/s1600/alchemy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 197px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IdjWv3BiZ50/TvNVP10PlmI/AAAAAAAAAvY/XBCDxiYt3HU/s200/alchemy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5688984484931671650" border="0" /></a><div>This week saw the anniversary of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penmachno_Document">Penmachno Document</a>, by which the True Prince of Wales and <strong>Owl of Aberffraw</strong>, Madog ap Llywelyn, granted a sod to my crested ancestor Ystlum ap Llewpart Goll, four rods below the forest of Calahir just off Ynys Seiriol.<br /><br />Because of accretions of <strong>mulch and poetry</strong> since 1294, it is impossible to dowse our plot's exact location, although each year the local, decayed branch of the House of Boyo proceeds there bearing a kinked <em>Radix Jesse</em> to beat the imagined boundaries around what is now the Trwyn Du lighthouse.<br /><br />In truth, December is a typically cruel month for Welsh monarchs. Madog had to treat with my leprous forbear on the shortest day, and his stormy predecessor <a href="http://www.princesofgwynedd.com/characters.asp?pid=11">Llywelyn ap Gruffydd</a> was cleaved in two at <strong>Cilmeri</strong> a week and twelve years earlier. </div><br /><div>Llywelyn's grandfather was Llewelyn The Great, a hard act to follow, and the boy had to settle for the dismal title of Llywelyn the Last. Some English types, or possibly their Welsh proto-New Labour hirelings, cut off his head and paraded it around London until its <strong>constant arguing and harmonising</strong> began to turn the milk sour. </div><br /><div>Although there is no evidence to prove this, the royal head was eventually sent to Ludlow's experimental Close-Contact Constabulary College and used to teach Marcher watchmen how to identify a Welshman by <strong>palpating his crown</strong>. </div><br /><div>After catastrophic casualties and a few <strong>scandalous elopements</strong>, the sheriff reverted to the more reliable method of having watchmen ask the suspect "how are you?". If the answer continues beyond the 20-second mark, pike him.</div><br /><div>On the 700th anniversary of Llewelyn's royal rending I was plashing through the wintry rain to an early-evening seminar on the Medieval Body Politic at University College, Swansea. I was in a sombre and thirsty mood, as both the weather and the hour cried out <em>"pub!"</em>, where the college branch of the ultra-nationalist <strong>League of the Cousins of Rebecca's Daughters</strong> was holding its annual wake for Our Last Rudder.</div><br /><div>I went to the seminar anyway because of my admiration for the mind, manner and moustache of <a href="http://www.thehaca.com/spotlight/AngloInterview.htm">Professor Sydney Anglo</a>, its chairman. Dr Anglo spoke Cockney Baroque and looked like Napoleon III with Savoy in his pocket. That surname didn't help my excuses to the Cousins, and sharpened suspicions about my <span style="font-style: italic;">Cambritude </span>already half-aroused by my <strong>bald cheekbones</strong> and filtered cigarettes.</div><br /><div>Young scholars paddled into the room, shaking out fringes and flares (we had a lad down from Lampeter). Dr Anglo scattered slabs of Carolingian minuscule about the table and set off on his anabasis about the <strong>tripes and tendons</strong> of the early European state. </div><br /><div>I was gazing out of the window as scrawls of lightning sketched out mountains in the night sky. Suddenly Dr Anglo addressed me: <em>"And <strong>what of the head</strong>, Mr Boyo? The head?"</em></div><br /><div><em>"The Prince is the head of the body of state, the 'corps estat',"</em> I managed <em>"As Christ is head of the 'corpus mysticum'. A subject, as a mere digit of the body, must rise at the Prince's command to <span style="font-weight: bold;">defend the regnum</span>, just as Christ, via His Vicar, commands the soul."</em></div><br /><div><em>"So what duties does the Prince, as head, have to the rest of his body?" </em>asked a nearby <span style="font-weight: bold;">blue stocking</span>. </div><br /><div>Dr Anglo, with a clear nod to Ernst Kantarowicz, noted <em>"Mr Boyo is racing ahead of the lances with his 'corpus mysticum', which Carolingians would have taken to mean The Divine Host, but he has accurately weighted the <span style="font-weight: bold;">seesaw of state</span>, Miss Bensberg. As Christ died for the sins of Christendom, so should the Prince be ready to sacrifice himself in battle for the common weal."</em></div><br /><div><em>"A <span style="font-weight: bold;">simple parallel</span> - Christ and the Church, the Prince and the State?"</em> probed Miss Bensberg. </div><br /><div><em>"Not so,"</em> I countered. <em>"What if John of Salisbury had been sensitive to pagan passions still pounding through the P-Celtic pustules below the Saxon surface? Perhaps the Prince is a <span style="font-weight: bold;">worthy sacrifice</span>, but must that be in battle?"</em></div><br /><div>The rain beat a steady, ever more <span style="font-weight: bold;">insistent tattoo</span> on the frail window frames. Dr Anglo gestured to me to continue.</div><br /><div><span style="font-style: italic;">"On this night the Romans marked one of their Agonalia, to <span style="font-weight: bold;">Sol Indiges</span>. With Wales crumbling through his twelve fingers, might Llywelyn not have fallen victim, or perhaps submitted, to the call of the Old Religion?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"As the Sun faded in the wintry sky, did a band of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Anglesey islanders</span> seek to summon Summer with a more terrible sacrifice?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Was Llywelyn's last vision not that of an uncomprehending Norman sword, as often thought, but rather a <span style="font-weight: bold;">sleek Silurian sliver of slate</span>, a dagger dedicated to the gods of the orchards and the fields?"</span> I concluded.<br /></div><br />The thunder passed, leaving a static silence.<span style="font-style: italic;"> "A most particular interpretation, Mr Boyo,"</span> Dr Anglo noted. <span style="font-style: italic;">"Any sources you might want to cite? Of a <span style="font-weight: bold;">non-cinematic nature</span>, please?"</span><br /><div></div><br />The exchange of smiles around the room stopped when our Lampeter visitor opened his notebook and read <span style="font-style: italic;">"'Fight for your patria and suffer even death for her if such should overwhelm you. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Death itself is Victory</span>." </span><br /><br />To Dr Anglo's raised eyebrow he added <span style="font-style: italic;">"<span style="font-weight: bold;">Saint Dubrick of Caerleon</span>, writing some time after Llywelyn's defeat, or should we say with the saint - 'Victory'?"</span><br /><br />Dr Anglo cracked his knuckles and snorted towards the skerried skies. <span style="font-style: italic;">"To summarise, my Gwalian gentlemen, you are suggesting that Llywelyn II did not die in an English ambush, but was <span style="font-weight: bold;">happily dispatched </span>by his fellow Welshmen so that through his blood sacrifice Wales might live?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"<span style="font-weight: bold;">Still here, aren't we, </span>despite everything?"</span> I muttered.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Hmm, a thesis indeed, and with your living evidence before our eyes." </span>grinned the professor. <span style="font-style: italic;">"An historian must not of course let himself be led astray by such, ah, <span style="font-weight: bold;">'heady'</span> speculation!"</span><br /><br />On that note we set off for our various digs and burrows. I shared an Embassy under the eaves with <span style="font-weight: bold;">Bell-Bottom Boy</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">"What do you think happened to Llywelyn's body, then?"</span> I asked.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that... a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any <span style="font-weight: bold;">dead Ancestour from the Dust </span>whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated,"</span> he recited.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Galen?"</span> I ventured.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Cotton Mather's 'Magnalia Christi Americana', after <span style="font-weight: bold;">Borellus</span>,"</span> he whispered, before hunching off into the rain.<br /><br />The following morning I turned on Radio 4's <span style="font-style: italic;">"Today"</span> programme to hear court Welshman John Humphrys relate that, during the previous evening's storm, a fireball had torn down the valley from Cilmeri and skittered out to sea like a wheel of Greek Fire.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">"Perhaps a little less saltpetre next time,"</span> I noted in my diary, and went back to sleep.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-58518093875536998252011-12-09T15:31:00.004+00:002011-12-09T18:03:58.590+00:00The Three KeithsOne of the many serendipitous delights of parenthood is discovering <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">children's television</span>. Not <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">rediscovering</span> - I mean discovering for the first time. There may be North Country funnymen who make a career out of recalling how kids TV <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"were better in them days"</span>, but in my case they are wrong.<br /><br />In <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Welsh Wales</span>, children's television consisted of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"Miri Mawr"</span> ("Big Fun"), a programme hosted by a yeti farmer, Japanese war criminal and the thing you see at the end of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"The Fly II"</span>, all cooped up in Osama bin Laden's utility cave. You don't believe me? Then watch:<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xprEbCo1-RU?rel=0" frameborder="0" width="420" height="315" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><br /><br /><br />Apart from a programme about poaching hosted by a <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">cardboard cormorant</span>, that was it.<br /><br />Nonetheless, there's a lack of role models for children in current cathode fare as well, unless they aspire to be Rastafarians, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"mangas"</span> or <strong>relentlessly perky Mexican moppets</strong>. That's why I've come up with my own proposal for pre-primary entertainment:<br /><br /><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"The Three Keiths"</span> are a trio of superheroes, each equipped with special powers to deal out <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">kinetic justice</span> rather than the usual self-righteousness to adults, wrongdoers and those boys in Year 6. And they are all real.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xRn9K7Fi58U/TuHuQhLPZxI/AAAAAAAAAuk/5i3qBK-S_2c/s1600/keith-richards94392.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5684086172269111058" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 136px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xRn9K7Fi58U/TuHuQhLPZxI/AAAAAAAAAuk/5i3qBK-S_2c/s200/keith-richards94392.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-STYLE: italic">Keith 1</span> - <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Keith Richards</span>, alias <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"Keef"</span>. Fashioned entirely from inside-out crocodiles and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"<a href="http://www.accessorize.com/en/restofworld/page/home/">Accessorize</a>"</span> tat, Keef is the leader of the pack. His special powers are <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">immortality</span>, demon-summoning riffs and the keys to <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"The Magic Pharmacy"</span>, where he distills potions to ward off squares and help the other Keiths relax - <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"just take the edge off things with this, man"</span>.<br /><br />He speaks <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">proper English</span> too, not the semi-Canadian nonsense children hear elsewhere.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UEzvzX0USwI/TuHurEWmxtI/AAAAAAAAAuw/cJVim6Zxh2o/s1600/floyd.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5684086628388619986" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 118px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UEzvzX0USwI/TuHurEWmxtI/AAAAAAAAAuw/cJVim6Zxh2o/s200/floyd.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-STYLE: italic"></span><span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-STYLE: italic">Keith 2</span> - <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Keith Floyd</span>, alias <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"Floyd"</span>. Made out of three old uncles bound together with bow-ties and raffia, Floyd provides the trio with all they need to keep going in the fight against tedium - top tuck, <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">refreshing elixirs</span> from his <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"secret cellar"</span> (<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"The steps are a bit steep for you children, and even for Old Floydie of an evening!"</span>) and an array of grown-up ladies whom girl viewers can totally identify with.<br /><br />Floyd's special powers are immunity to <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">weights &amp; measures</span> and indifference to human laws.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_J_18_smecA/TuHvAfYqRiI/AAAAAAAAAu8/ROTtMkSU2RE/s1600/joe.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5684086996422247970" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 150px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_J_18_smecA/TuHvAfYqRiI/AAAAAAAAAu8/ROTtMkSU2RE/s200/joe.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-STYLE: italic">Keith 3</span> - The <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Right Hon Sir Keith Joseph Bt, CH, PC</span> alias <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"Sir Keith Joseph"</span>. The ganglion that connects the twin synapses of the team, Sir Keith Joseph is often called upon to get Floyd and Keef out of a terrible fix - in all senses of the word. His swivelling gaze can hypnotise reptiles, and he conjures up bad ideas decades ahead of their time to tie up gangs of villains long enough for our heroes to get away in the Bentley.<br /><br />Sir Keith Joseph also carries a mysterious object loaned to him by the fearsome <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"Magg Witch"</span>. Called simply <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"The Handbag"</span>, it has <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">voodoo economic qualities</span> that keep afloat Floyd's various front organisations for the Three through fire, submersion in lakes and the wretched inflexibility of magistrates.<br /><br />I chose these three Keiths from a highly competitive field - <strong>Chegwin came close</strong> - because they alone address the main banes of pre-teen life: bad music, dull food, and inadequate transparency in the management of public finances.<br /><br />Having got that far during an episode of <em>"Fifi and the Flower Tots"</em> - a sort of nursery take on <em>"The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers"</em> - I decided to celebrate with an amphora of <strong>Makarios's Revenge</strong>, and so have managed to outline only the following pilot:<br /><br />At their secret <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Berkshire base</span> - a picturesque inn-<em>cum</em>-recording-studio-<em>cum</em>-monetarist-think-tank - the Keiths prepare themselves for battle through a training regimen of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">bushido</span> rigour, designed by Keef and featuring feedback, flashbacks and blackjack.<br /><br />The lady of the manor, Penelope Keith <em>("The Fourth Keith")</em>, alerts them to various dangers gleaned from <strong>sherry-laced parsonage gossip</strong>. Keef immediately cranks up the Bentley, which Floyd has left parked either side of an oak tree, then has a bit of a lie down in the barn while Floyd packs a hamper. Sir Keith Joseph bores a hole through the estate gates with his unblinking emerald eyes, and they're off!<br /><br />This week, jobsworth music teachers <strong>Bono &amp; Sting</strong> (frequent villains) persuade the village <em>fête</em> to play their listless ditties over the public address system while a mantis-like Mrs Sting from the cooperative <em>Café Ortega</em> doles out quinoa-burgers with <em>"Amazonian chewy grub salad"</em>, thereby compounding the misery of parents who've driven children with computer-withdrawal symptoms 20 miles to meet a pregnant goat.<br /><br />The Three Keiths lope to it. Keef drops some <em>"magic pirate potion, man"</em> in the eco-punch before plugging the PA into his amp and launching a <strong>12-bar open-G rasp </strong>through <em>"<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lNP-x94-SE">Rocks Off</a>"</em> that paints the village green a bluesy shade of black.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Floyd has set out a trestle of <strong>truffled turkey and trifles</strong> to tempt teen and termagant alike, as the punch works its wonders on the mums and dads. Everyone's having a good time by now, but - oh no! - Bono and the Stings are complaining to <em>Ms</em> Polly Tecnick the Headmistress and Mr Spendthrift the Mayor. This is a job for Sir Keith Joseph!<br /><br />Quick as a slide-rule, Sir Keith delves into <em>"The Handbag"</em> and whips out a brace of Magg Witch talismans - one in Mrs Sting's name for employing <strong>non-unionised Paraguayan waitresses</strong> in her cafe, and another in recognition of Mr Spendthrift's discreet acceleration of a council house sale shortly before the local ban.<br /><br /><em>"And how is your holiday companion Fräulein Proll settling in there?"</em> Sir Keith asked of Ms Tecnick, before handing over a <em>Krugerrand</em> pendant for her elegant redrawing of the school catchment boundary just short of the Reg Varney Estate and that Irish tinkers' site. He then let the <strong>Invisible Hand of Recrimination</strong> go to work on the gruesome quintet.<br /><br />The Three Keiths slip away from what is now a <strong>seriously happening free festival</strong>, their work done for another week as rainbows, brandy butter and sink estates light up the Chilterns - but not before offering the Paraguayan ladies a gallant lift home or somewhere.<br /><br />I believe <em>"The Three Keiths"</em> will inspire, educate and alarm in the correct proportion, thereby forewarning tots of all the <strong>gluten-free golems </strong>out there who want to keep them in locked-rhythm serfdom.No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-49134131937809481862011-11-30T11:43:00.008+00:002011-12-01T09:22:16.994+00:00My Universities: Restauranteur<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cg9WsgBqKwY/TtYeHc8OYbI/AAAAAAAAAuY/ZqHpV8-ITdQ/s1600/bouffe.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 205px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 209px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5680761093351170482" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cg9WsgBqKwY/TtYeHc8OYbI/AAAAAAAAAuY/ZqHpV8-ITdQ/s320/bouffe.jpg" /></a>You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react when they pass a <strong>deconsecrated church</strong>.<br /><br />The demise of Soviet Communism means that 150 million previously cheerful Slavs now wave their hands around their torsos as if swatting away a <strong>lustful giant bumblebee </strong>whenever they survey some of Stalin's finest handiwork.<br /><br /><strong>British town planners </strong>used to think <em>"bank!"</em>, but now that we all know what happens in such establishments they prefer to mumble <em>"er, supermarket or mosque - is there a way to combine the two?"</em><br /><br />The average Welshman thinks <em>"the wages of Episcopalianism is being turned into an <strong>XXX</strong> <strong>porn cinema</strong>, though but"</em>.<br /><br /><strong>Maximum Bob Friog </strong>and I were making steady if bow-legged progress past the Methodist Church on York Road, Reading, after another lesson on why <em>The Moderation</em> was the least appropriate name for the given pub. I noticed the church had recently been closed down, and admired the way its Gothic twin steeples parted the red clouds.<br /><br />Bob looked it up and down, took one of the cigs out of his mouth, threw his head back and bellowed <em><strong>"MEAT!!!" </strong></em><br /><br />We proceeded to <em>The Hobgoblin</em>, where Bob elaborated on his <strong>new kind of cuisine</strong>.<br /><br />Prospective diners arrive at MEAT! - a deconsecrated church in the Caversham borders - guided by the <strong>Frankenstein sparks </strong>that leap from one tower to the other thanks to the Van Der Graaff generator that long replaced the bell.<br /><br />The bone-studded doors of solid Boerewors swing open to unleash a mounting barrage of timpani rolls that turn out to be a <strong>fusillade of evangelists </strong>catapulting into the giant tureens of nutty slack that dangle across the dining hall.<br /><br />You are welcomed by Bob's then girlfriend, a comely Persian with a degree from Shiraz University in Advanced Mindfucking <em>(egregia cum laude)</em>. If your clothes please her, she passes you on to a <strong>friendly Hells Angel</strong> who rides you to your assigned place at the sole, endless table. No, not a Harley. He rides you.<br /><br />Any remark about anything at all, and she sorts you. Your young lady is propelled into one of the many kickboxing-movie-surplus dancing-girl cages to win back her freedom through <strong>tearful hip-gyrations</strong>, while Sir joins the vagrants, lepers and endangered species down in the larder.<br /><br />MEAT! dispenses with the outmoded restaurant system of menu, crockery and service, opting instead for a <strong>guided dining experience</strong>.<br /><br />Your place at the table comes complete with hollowed out tree-trunk stool - there are no toilets - meat trough and booze dimple. Every ten minutes or so the pig-iron doors to the kitchen fly open to reveal <em>Gran Maître </em>Bob Friog, naked apart from a bloodsoaked leather apron, framed in flames.<br /><br />His trademark cry of <em>"MEAT!!!"</em>, fedback through the over-amplified speaker stacks under the table, releases a phalanx of bikers with hunks of <strong>half-cooked beast </strong>impaled on their <em>Pickelhauben</em>. You get what you're given and are vocally grateful, in unison.<br /><br />The meat is real meat. Fish and chicken are classed as vegetables and <strong>dropped live </strong>through grills to the Vegetarian section in the Crypt. Salad is provided throughout, for use as ashtrays. Smoking is not compulsory, and the righthand side of the table is reserved for lungcoddler weaklings.<br /><br />In order to keep MEAT! the right side of at least one law, <strong>tobacco is banned</strong>.<br /><br />MEAT! is ecologically aware, so drink is served by the bottle it comes in. Brown Booze = ale, Red Booze = wine, Yellow Booze = scotch. All booze is selected by your designated Hells Angel, Filthy Al, in line with the meat you got and whatever he hasn't already necked or <strong>poured down your date's cleavage</strong>.<br /><br />Vodka, lager and all other mixers are banned, except in the <strong>Snakebite Express </strong>takeaway outlet in the Vestry.<br /><br />MEAT! works with the local community, and encourages the pupils of the nearby primary school to befriend the animals on its Great Beast City Farm at all stages of their furry odyssey from pallet to plate. This culminates in the <strong>Imbolg Wolf Cub Challenge</strong>, at which lucky children compete to see who can eat their way out of a boar revolving on a spit before the flames take.<br /><br />Dessert is more meat, served with a pineapple on top. And leave your wallet at home because you won't be presented with any bill. Instead Al and his mates will <strong>ransack your house</strong> and sell what they need to cover your meal. For a perfect end to a perfect evening, they may still be there when you get back.<br /><br />I was impressed by this vision, and set to designing an <strong>advertising campaign</strong>. Readers will recall my previous attempt at promoting <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-universities-advertising.html">Start</a>, the world's least appetising breakfast cereal, through guerrilla TV shots of Dennis Skinner MP yelling <em>"Eat Start, it's Shit!"</em>, not to mention my promotion of Matthew Ward's <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/scenes-from-pedantic-hard-boiled-novel.html">Robo-TEFL Teacher</a> screenplay.<br /><br />I decided that MEAT! required something a <strong>little more sophisticated</strong>, and came up with the three following ads:<br /><br /><br /><strong><em>1. </em></strong>A man is driving through a grey London late afternoon. The wife at his side is droning on about some new restaurant with <em>"to-die-for"</em> goat's cheese <em>crêpes</em>. He stops at the lights, and a <strong>squeegee-merchant </strong>starts soaping his windscreen.<br /><br />From the driver's point of view we watch the sponge circle hypnotically, as the wife's adenoidal litany of lettuce recipes fades away into steady <em>crescendi </em>of pounding timpani. Almost imperceptibly, the sponge turns into a <strong>raw, red steak</strong>, smearing blood all over the windscreen, and the woolly-hatted merchant morphs into a gurning Bob Friog, naked apart from his sanguinary leather apron.<br /><br />The driver turns to his wife and screams <em><strong>"MEAT!!!"</strong></em><br /><br />Cut to a black screen, with the simple caption <em>"Bob Says Eat My Meat"</em>.<br /><br /><strong><em></em></strong><br /><strong><em>2. </em></strong>A wife sits in her underwear at the dressing table of a well-appointed bedroom. She puts on her make-up and jewellery as her husband chats from the <em>en-suite </em>bathroom about the restaurant they are about to visit - steamed fish and <strong>sustainable samphire</strong> a speciality.<br /><br />His prattling fades out in the mounting march of drums, the bedroom door bursts open and in stalks Bob in trademark <em>déshabille </em>and clotted apron. The wife turns, mouth open. Bob draws a raw steak <strong>from his crotch </strong>and rubs it bloody in her face before flinging it against the cream silk wall. He leaves.<br /><br />The husband's voice fades back, asking <em>"So what's it to be, darling, <strong>tipila linguine</strong>?"</em> He wanders into the bedroom and drops his towel as his wife shrieks <em>"MEAT!!!"</em> through bloody teeth.<br /><br />Cut to black screen etc.<br /><br /><strong><em></em></strong><br /><strong><em>3. </em>Whitechapel, the autumn of 1888</strong>, and Old Jack is at his exercise. A petticoated figure is slumped in a grimy midnight doorway. Over her hunches a top-hatted figure in black, a Gladstone bag by his side. A blade flashes in the guttering gaslight. Two policemen advance slowly on the scene of slaughter. We hear only their panicked breathing - <em>"at last! at last!" </em><br /><br />A uniformed arms reaches over and grabs the killer by the shoulder, spinning him round. In a <strong>crash close-up </strong>we catch only the bloodshot eyes, the stubbled, sweaty cheeks, the rotten teeth twisted into a grimace.<br /><br />The policeman releases his grip. <em>"Oh, sorry, Bob," </em>he mutters. The two officers salute, and move on down the cobbled alley.<br /><br />The camera pans up to a killing moon as the Victorian London skyline is torn by a cry of <em>"MEAT!!!!"</em>, slowly subsiding into a <strong>bestial snarl</strong>. And fade to red.<br /><br />-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br /><br />The York Road church is now sheltered housing for the bank managers who heard <strong>our initial business pitch</strong>, but Boyo-Friog Associates are still in talks with some East European investors and actively seeking unhallowed ground.No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-29955651783118837272011-11-06T11:31:00.008+00:002012-07-05T08:24:26.828+00:00The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EBsx7G4k0jU/TrcvA6ayT_I/AAAAAAAAAuE/QrlPMPvAWLQ/s1600/book.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5672053948424540146" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EBsx7G4k0jU/TrcvA6ayT_I/AAAAAAAAAuE/QrlPMPvAWLQ/s200/book.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 148px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 200px;" /></a><br /><div>Unlike Wales, plain women and his BBC paymasters, I like Jeremy Clarkson. The obsession with motor cars and himself does not move me, but I enjoy his unmasking of lettuce and willingness to wander around in public looking like Jeremy Clarkson. His facial tributes to <b><a href="http://www.theofficialjohncarpenter.com/pages/themovies/th/thpofr.html">John Carpenter's The Thing</a></b> (mid-transformation) never cease to please.<br /><br />News that he had taken his <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/alex-hall-only-jeremy-clarkson-and-i-know-the-truth-now-we-can-both-put-our-side-across-6258029.html">first wife as a mistress</a> - a lady who must be an echoing cavern of self-loathing - ushers him into the <b>Alan Clark Waiting-Room of Caddish Eminence</b>. The time has come to drop the sports jacket and jeans for a gap between the front teeth, trim 'tache, cravat, blazer and personal tankard behind the bar of a country pub near Maidenhead - where they call him <i>"Major"</i> and keep a room upstairs in case the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyj9VMhE6oI">Jaaaaaaaaaaag</a> breaks down and he needs to comfort his secretary.<br /><br />Jeremy also puts me in mind of a niche Christmas <b>gift market for unpopular men</b> that has not yet been skewered by the axis of socks and cologne. I call it <i>"The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings"</i>.<br /><br />The target buyer is a recently-divorced woman. She has the house and most of the money, but there's one thing she can't take from the noisome octopus to whom she was lately wed - <b>his puerility</b>. And divorce gives him the chance to rediscover it.<br /><br />He's already kitting out his <b>batchelor hutch</b> with all the apparel of midlife adolescence:<br /><br /><ul><li>a <b>water sofa-bed</b></li><li>a fridge with easily-distinguishable <b>bacon and lager</b> sections</li><li>a PC with patent <b><i>"Plasterer's Radio"</i></b> self-degumming monitor</li><li>a compact recording studio, <b>still in its box</b>, and, above all,</li><li>a giant flatscreen HD television on which to wallow in the <b>films of yesteryear</b>.</li></ul><br />What he <b>least expects</b> is such an apparently-thoughtful gift as <i>"The Jeremy Clarkson Book of Happy Endings"</i> from his ex-wife. This bangs all the right gongs:<br /><br /><ul><li>It look like a <a href="http://www.vintageladybird.com/history.html">Ladybird book</a>, evoking teary memories of childish thumbing through the <i>"Kings &amp; Queens of England"</i> in search of <b>good beheadings</b></li><li>It is endorsed by Jeremy, which guarantees wit as dry as a <b>Martian Martini</b>, and</li><li><i>"Happy Endings"</i> reminds him of something that happened to Mike on a golfing holiday in <b>Bangkok, </b>which would have been alright if the girl in question hadn't turned out to have been a chap.</li></ul><br />Plus the fact it's a book means that, alongside his car manual and bound volumes of Viz, he now has a <b>library</b>.<br /><br />And so he settles down in the director's chair with his feet up on the boxed set of Japanese import <i>"Wacky Races"</i> DVDs and opens <i>"Clarkson"</i>. On the right-hand page he sees a picture of a Turkish gangster shooting up a seraglio. Excellent. On the left he reads the following text:<br /><br /><i>Kevin Spacey is <b>Keyser Söze</b> in "The Usual Suspects".</i><br /><br />The nightmare begins. The picture lured him in, then the words delivered the <i>coup de grace</i>. Before he can cover his eyes, the film is ruined. But he cannot stop. <b>Jeremy beckons</b>. In misery he turns the page. A sweaty man in a baseball cap stares at him.</div><div><br /></div><div><i><b>Soylent Green</b> is people!</i></div><div><br /></div><div>He blinks back the tears as his fingers flick across to the wheaten features of a <b>brown-suited child</b>, receding down a Georgetown sidestreet.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>The psychiatrist is dead. Obvious since the scene with his <b>wife in the church</b>, when you think about it. </i></div><div><br /></div><div>On he goes, through the wreckage of his film archive. <b>Merry is the widow</b>, for she has understood and overcome a fundamental male survival technique.</div><br />Men have <b>no long-term memory</b>. That's why we compile lists - not only because we believe in wasting time better spent shoe-shopping or listening to women, but because otherwise we'd forgot your names and where the kids' schools are. <br /><div></div><div><br /></div><div>This is a true blessing, and proof of the existence of a <b>genial and thoroughly clubbable God</b>. It means that we rarely reflect upon the essential shallowness of our own existence, have no problems with enjoying football and will, after a shandy, chat up your sister at a christening once again.</div><div><br /></div><div>It also explains why we watch the same films over and over. I for one can never remember that <b>Stapleton's sister</b> is in fact his wife, despite the mundanity of such arrangements back in Wales, and therefore approach each reading/viewing of <i>"The Hound of the Baskervilles"</i> with a lamb-like skip. </div><div><br /></div><div>Women, on the other hand, need to know. This is why they read the last page of a book first, to assure themselves that it is worth reading. This is also why they ask what men are thinking all the time. Men, like my near namesake in <i>"Under Milk Wood"</i>, are either thinking of <b>wet corsets or nothing</b>.</div><div><br /></div><div>And so the divorcé looks forward to evening after curry-stoked evening in his celluloid back catalogue, with the flicker of the cathode reflecting his <b>rapt gaze of amazement</b> as the Mafia and entire US Government kill JFK from all possible angles, some gunman takes out Carter on a charcoal Geordie beach, and the Christian copper dies at the setting of the pagan Summerisle Sun.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>"The Clarkson Book of Happy Endings"</i> is the ex-wife's silent revenge, for her former spouse can't stop reading on despite the horrors it holds. Men are all addicts, and if it's bad for them they just can't stop. His <b>meagre interior life</b> dissolves in each acid page, but forward he goes like Scott of the Unconscious, snivelling <i>"Why Jeremy, Why?"</i>, until the last page. </div><div><br /></div><div>There <b>Edgar Allan Poe</b> meets his red-rimmed stare, holding a rubber mask in his ivory hands.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>And you would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>It's <i>"<a href="http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/l_kiy.htm">The King in Yellow</a>"</i> for this post-decadent century. Buy it now ladies, and <b>our world is yours</b>.</div><div><br /><br /><i>"Pa vo beuzet Paris, Ec'h adsavo Ker Is."</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-86525483731339658982011-10-18T12:00:00.009+00:002011-11-06T17:25:35.998+00:00Sobriety as Spectacle<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KaCgESmMh2Y/Tprb681wBtI/AAAAAAAAAtg/TFqySO6MjMk/s1600/greenpeace.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 250px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5664081287182288594" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KaCgESmMh2Y/Tprb681wBtI/AAAAAAAAAtg/TFqySO6MjMk/s320/greenpeace.jpg" /></a>There's a touching Soviet film called <em>"<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aumeFES2Us0">Autumn Marathon</a>"</em>, in which a random Dane gets thrown into a Glorious Socialist drunk tank. He returns to his Leningrad hosts the next morning with the sort of look in his eyes that you'd get after a particularly invasive bout of <strong>alien abduction</strong>. <em>"There were many new words there,"</em> he muttered into his <em>kvass</em>.<br /><br />That Mr Putin is a ghastly man by any standards. When not punching bears or <strong>switching off Belarus</strong>, he's throwing away the good bits of the Soviet legacy and hanging on to the rotten ones.<br /><br />So Stalinism and screwing up the Middle East are ok again, but the cosy violence of your local yokel bobby is not. Instead the Russians have to put up with armour-plated <strong>sacks of steroids</strong> with guns that work and a licence to park their giant motorbikes in the crack of your arse.<br /><br />Most shameful of all is Putin's decision to close the <strong>drunk tanks</strong>. The <em>вытрезвитель </em>(sobering-up station) predates the Revolution, but the Bolsheviks gave it the lacquer of pseudo-science, priggishness and theft that helped it endure to this day.<br /><br />The Soviets scorned the sentimental, bourgeois practice of encouraging doctors to shelter alcoholics and their families until they were <strong>fit to return to serfdom</strong>. Instead they handed over the drunk tanks to the the police and let them:<br /><br /><ul><li><strong>hose</strong> down random drunks, not necessarily with water, </li><br /><li>steal their <strong>remaining shoe</strong>, </li><br /><li>show them a graph correlating the impact of drinking <em>"Natasha"</em> perfume on the output of <strong>self-combusting television sets</strong>, </li><br /><li>kick them in the <strong>danglers</strong>; and </li><br /><li><strong>dump</strong> them in a snow drift</li></ul>but not before billing them two kopecks for the trouble. One minute you're warming up for a midnight Stockhausen serenade outside the ex-wife's flat, and the next some <strong>single-cell Siberian soaks </strong>are trying to use you as a wind sock. Once you manage to stagger home the first thing you need is a stiff drink and a fight, and back to the tank you go.<br /><br />This may sound reactionary, but in fact it displays <strong>Scientific Socialism</strong> at its most exquisite. Capitalists require a professional police force to repress the workers and their annoying middle-class representatives, while feudal rulers intimidated, entertained and sometimes fed the cowled masses with spectacular public punishments.<br /><br />A Socialist society, requires no such agencies of doom. The Soviet police simply brought members of the drinking classes together and allowed them to exchange teeth, fluids and <strong>experimental impregnation techniques</strong> in the seclusion of a basement urinal until their anti-people manifestations were spent.<br /><br />The police then put the given parasite's actions in their socio-economic context, provided <em>"look-no-hands"</em> washing facilities and returned him to society. Seizing items of the visitor's clothing provided him with a tantalising glimpse of the <strong>Victory of Communism</strong>, when money is abolished and goods and services are simply exchanged.<br /><br />The two-kopeck fee was a reminder that this dazzling future when, to quote Engels, <em>"state interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself" (<strong>Anti-Dühring</strong>)</em>, had not yet arrived.<br /><br />The <strong>kick in the nuts</strong> was free.<br /><br />President Gorbachev, like all busy little reformers, had no time to sit back with a glass of horseradish vodka and a crackling <strong>pipeful of perique</strong> to peruse the lessons of history. That's why he thought Prohibition would sort out the problems of alcoholism, falling output and commodity fetishism, just like it didn't in America.<br /><br />The result was tumbling mortality rates as the man in the stalling trolleybus took to drinking flight fuel, the total collapse of the economy as everyone spent all their time making, procuring and drinking red-eye, and the rise of the Russian Mafia. Oh, and the Soviet Union shrank from super-power status to the back of Gorbachev's limo, which had had its hub caps stolen and fashioned into rather <strong>fetching earrings</strong> by the eternally drunk President Yeltsin. Cheers!<br /><br />Putin is so busy that he can't even be bothered to learn from Gorbachev's mistakes, which is why his new big idea is to shut down the drunk tanks and shunt their clients off to the <strong>Accident &amp; Emergency </strong>ward of the nearest hospital.<br /><br />Perhaps he's trying to return to the medical as opposed to dialectical approach to sobriety pioneered in Tsarist Russia. If so then he, above all, should know what happened to the Romanovs. Another country that adopts this approach is Britain, whose record on public drunkeness is admired only by <strong>dead Vikings</strong>.<br /><br />From a strictly Marxist point of view, there may be some benefits to this. Even if you have never been to Russia, you should be able to conduct the following <strong>thought experiment</strong>:<br /><br /><ul><li>Imagine a <strong>British hospital </strong>that was last equipped and cleaned in 1964</li><li>Imagine it staffed by <strong>angry, underpaid medics</strong></li><li>Imagine it full of <strong>know-all hypochondriac grannies</strong>.<br /></li></ul><p>Now imagine this happy scene flooded with bellowing men in <strong>piss-stained brown flares</strong>, waving pickled gherkins about their bandaged heads, and draw your own conclusions about Mr Putin's chances of completing his third presidential term.</p><p>I never made it to a Soviet drunk tank, despite the best efforts of friends and colleagues, but a couple of my fellow students in Voronezh were once called upon to bail out "Major" Farid Bouaouni, an <strong>Algerian Situationist shepherd</strong> who looked like Major Easy. <a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M7CoyBiA6hc/Tp1ZCkj8evI/AAAAAAAAAts/XOlkjftEuNc/s1600/eazy_mini.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 193px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 137px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5664781807011003122" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M7CoyBiA6hc/Tp1ZCkj8evI/AAAAAAAAAts/XOlkjftEuNc/s200/eazy_mini.jpg" /></a><br /><br />He had refused to pay his bill at the Hotel Brno, prompting a visit from the police. They were minded to let him go with the standard <strong>clout and shake-down</strong>, but he insisted that he only wanted to <em>"converse with socialists"</em>. So off to the tank with him.</p>The desk sergeant was delighted to deliver The Major into the custody of Her Britannic Majesty's student corps, as the boy had caused major <em>delerium tremens</em> among his cellmates by enacting Berkoff's <em>"Metamorphosis"</em> while swinging from the ceiling with his <strong>unusually adhesive palms</strong>.<br /><br /><div>This made Farid the only man to have emerged from a Soviet drunk tank drier than when he went in, and with his <strong>genitals </strong>largely in the same location and configuration.<br /><br /></div><div>He celebrated his release by stealing the wreath from the <strong>Tomb of the Unburied Soldier</strong>, placing it on his chest and trying to ignite it through an act of gastric acrobatics on Red Army Day. He was deported to Algiers on two separate flights.<br /><br /></div><div>The Russians were proud of their drunk tanks, and sought to <strong>share their cultural wealth </strong>with other, meaner nations. While holidaying in Soviet Armenia I read in the local paper that the first drunk tank had opened in the capital, Yerevan.<br /><br /></div><div>I asked my hosts what the point was, as Armenians drink in the Mediterranean style - wine with meals - rather than in the Slavonic traditions - <strong>turps with knives</strong>. Tigran the Jeans-Wrangler flipped the paper over to the Stop Press column, which noted <em>"Yerevan Police Dogs Congratulate Man From Omsk On Becoming First Drunk Tank Customer"</em>.<br /><br />Readers dismayed at Russia's abandoning its worthy Soviet heritage need not despair, for there is always <strong>Ukraine</strong>. With their Neapolitan attitude to public service and legal mildew, Ukrainians continue to bask in the Soviet glories of nepotism, unregulated shed building and policing as a form of improvisatory street theatre.<br /><br /></div><div>A friend has a wooden summer house in a village outside Kiev, where his good lady wife was spending a pleasant morning <strong>grinding chillis</strong> into her baby food. A drunk approached, demanding 7.35 <i>hryvnyas</i> for a bottle of monkey juice. She demurred, as had a number of neighbours already. The drunk declared that he would burn the village down, and was still trying to drop lit matches onto his amber stream of urine when the police arrived.<br /><br /></div><div>As the coppers dragged the drunk away, the lady of the house asked how long he would get in jail - <strong>attempted arson</strong> being a serious crime in Ukraine.</div><div><br /></div><div><p><em>"Jail?! D'you think we're going to feed this git for five years? Don't worry ma'am, we'll just take him to those woods, macerate him thoroughly with the help of these excellent <strong>new Polish truncheons</strong>, point what's left towards Obukhiv District and tell him never to come back again. All in a day's work. A couple of chillis? Why, thank you - they'll come in handy if his attention drifts! Mornin' all!"</em></p><strong>British stag parties</strong> must have tired of using the Baltic States as lavabos by now, so drunk-tank tourism is one of the many income funnels that Ukraine may yet drain. Russia misses the boat once again. But then Putin reserves the right to sink it any time he chooses.<br /><strong><br /></strong></div><div><b>It's good to be the Tsar.<br /></b><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><p></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><p></p></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34326573.post-294888474819501222011-10-06T10:45:00.003+00:002011-10-06T10:54:58.105+00:00Untergang heut Morgen<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RaW7gAiL40Y/To2HiyIoRuI/AAAAAAAAAtY/N-KzHrPJ6oI/s1600/spengler.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 173px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 256px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5660329338317850338" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RaW7gAiL40Y/To2HiyIoRuI/AAAAAAAAAtY/N-KzHrPJ6oI/s320/spengler.jpg" /></a> <br /><div>Whenever I hear <strong>Miriam Makeba</strong> my thoughts naturally turn to Spengler's theory of <em>pseudomorphosis</em>.<br /><br />Spengler, a ponderous <em>interbellum</em> Teuton, was not keen on jazz or any other form of <em>"negro"</em> music, so it's fair to say he would not have enjoyed Mama Africa's democratic syncopations any more than the on-beat flow of <strong>Ices Cube or T</strong>.<br /><br />Ms Makeba is the name I always associate with the <strong>anti-Apartheid campaign</strong>, the cause closest to the lapels of my fellow students in the 1980s. And Spengler springs to mind whenever I think of students.<br /><br />Oswald Spengler's <strong>insufficiently underrated</strong> book <em>"The Decline of the West"</em> falls into the same category as the works of Ayn Rand, namely philosophy for people who don't like philosophy.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the old boy died in the happy knowledge that he was the only man in 1930s Germany who could get away with belittling Hitler as an <em>"heroic tenor"</em>, thanks to the popularity of <em>"Decline"</em> among <strong>damp-palmed Prussian professors</strong> and their pimply charges.<br /><br /><em>"Decline"</em> is an attempt at a cyclical analysis of history. Cultures rise, atrophy into civilisation then decline, because people are basically a bunch of clowns and <strong>everything new is rubbish</strong>. Egyptians, Chinese, Europeans - none of us stand a chance.<br /><br />Democracy, <strong>hip-gyratin' music</strong> and priest-baiting are particular signs that the West is finished. Perhaps a military dictator might help. Spengler wasn't sure, and took two volumes a decade apart to say so.<br /><br />Anxious youths - the sort who think <em>"Steppenwolf"</em> is all about them - loved this sepulchral sludge. Kissinger gave the <strong>already miserable Richard Nixon</strong> a copy for his bedside table - proof if ever it were needed that Henry was a Democrat mole.<br /><br />Still, a book that size can't all be wrong, unless it's written by Quakers, and <em>"Decline of the West"</em> has its moments. <em>Pseudomorphosis</em> rather appeals to me - new, vigorous cultural growth cannot break out of the trappings of senile civilisation, and so turns on it with <strong>Oedipal fury</strong>.<br /><br />Antonio Gramsci, up the other end of the geographical, political and <strong>coherence see-saw</strong>, had a similar insight in his <em>"Prison Notebooks"</em>, when he wrote that the <em>"old is dying and the new cannot be born"</em>. Gramsci saw this as a mere stumble on the trek to progress.<br /><br />But when you look at student political engagement since the heroic tenor days of 1936, it's hard not to agree with Spengler that the <i><b>"morbid symptoms"</b></i> are really here to stay.<br /><br />In 1936 the cause was <strong>Spain</strong>. A few Papal oddballs saluted Franco from the safety of their armchairs as the Condor Legion thundered over their tonsured, straw-filled heads. But the Republic was joined on the battlefields of Málaga and Madrid by Oxbridge's finest poets, Wales's hardest miners and England's better Blair.<br /><br />It's easy to point to Soviet skullduggery behind enemy lines, <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.com/2008/03/i-shot-george-orwell.html">as I've done before</a>, but Spain was the opening skirmish of the Second World War. Hitler wasn't truly defeated on the Western Front until Franco died, and anyone who fought the <strong>squat Galician</strong> is all right by me.<br /><br />British youth has since had its native <strong>Beserker genes</strong> blunted by the pacifist bromides of higher education and its rage against tyranny sapped by a spurious sense of pseudo-socialist solidarity with the Soviet. This explains how its epic performance in Spain and Normandy was followed by the shameful slouch towards Aldermaston in the 1950s, and the reduction of Vietnam War protests to grandstanding for Ho Chi Mindlessess.<br /><br />Things improved in the gritty '70s and '80s - perhaps due to unemployment and the declining quality of smack. <b>Chile</b>, in particular, was a noble and often practical campaign against a squalid dictatorship, despite being tainted in Wales by Dafydd Iwan's neverending <em>"Cân Victor Jara"</em>.<br /><br />But those decades were defined by anti-Apartheid. The movement had its fair selection of heads both hot and soft, but even a strong aversion to Desmond Tutu couldn't stir much sympathy for the <strong>Vogon Bothas</strong>.<br /><br />In Wales the political is personal, and the <strong>personal is critical</strong>. My sympathy with the Anti-Apartheid Movement stemmed from having had to listen to my distant cousin <em>"Uncle Robin"</em>, who had emigrated to South Africa to join the Bureau of State Security. The last time I'd seen him was May 1979, when he'd popped back to Britain for the general election in order to see <em>"</em><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/05/interview-coalition-labour"><em>that Communist, David Owen</em></a><em>"</em> lose his seat.<br /><br />With such <strong>sawtooth political sense</strong> it's frankly a miracle that Apartheid lasted as long as it did. I was glad to see the sunburnt back of it. Uncle Robin was last heard of in a Christmas card from <em>"Zimbabwe-Rhodesia"</em> before decamping to Bournemouth with a lady from Lourenço Marques.<br /><br />As May turned to December and Mandela made way for whoever, I would sometimes bump into the anti-Apartheid scarf-wearers of my college days and ask them how they thought the new South Africa was getting on. This sobering but far from sober experience helped to formulate the <strong>No Good Boyo Iron Rules of Student Politics</strong>, applicable to all causes:<br /><br />1. <strong>The Dana Condundrum</strong>: All Kinds of Everything was happening in Africa, but getting rid of Apartheid was the only one that mattered, and somehow made the others go away, even though it didn't.<br /><br />2. <strong>The Ilf &amp; Petrov Thesis </strong>: Once Apartheid was defeated, everything in South Africa was ok. Based on the novel <em>"The Twelve Chairs"</em>, by the aforementioned Soviet writers, in which we find the slogan <em>"No one can save the drowning but the drowning themselves"</em> ("Дело помощи утопающим — дело рук самих утопающих").<br /><br />3. <strong>The <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ6yXkQFzgI">Fintan Stack</a> Amendment</strong>: Evidence against points 1. and 2. suggesting that Africa still had problems, and that South Africa was letting the side down over Mugabe and AIDS, were met by a blank look that said <em>"I had my fun, and that's all that mattered"</em>.<br /><br />Very patient readers will recall that my unfinished doctoral thesis concerned university unrest in Tsarist Russia, and one of the reasons I gave up - apart from finding out that <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.com/2011/05/wretched-dionysus.html">some rotter had already written it</a> - was the realisation that politics at the student stage suffers from <strong>precocious senility</strong>.<br /><br />The charity-shop shufflers get involved, get laid, get jobs and get lost. They then leave quotidian politics to the <strong>dullard dynasties</strong> of Kinnocks and Milibands and single-string campaigning to the tone-deaf sectarians of the far left.<br /><br />Meanwhile, their place in the student trenches is taken by more Home-Counties Hillaries on a three-year stretch. It's like a <strong>First World War opera by Philip Glass</strong> - slight tweaks to the same theme, with some modulation but no development. And then you graduate.<br /><br />University College Swansea, where I studied <strong>slate maintenance and cockle husbandry</strong> (joint honours), was one of the least political campuses in Britain. Seventy year of drunk Labour MPs and the conviction that Mrs Thatcher wasn't really prime minister because she's a <em>"bird"</em> had dulled the already rusty hoe of student activism.<br /><br />The Student Union was largely concerned with scrabbling around for a quorum, every mention of which prompted a bellow of <em>"scrotum!"</em> from the Rugby Club props who seemed to think the debating chamber was their changing room. It was so apolitical that we had an <strong>SDP Union President</strong> for about five years - the SDP being the political party for people who don't like politics.<br /><br />The rare debates amounted to the curlew cry of the Athletic Union pleading to opt out of the college bilingual policy. This obliged them to submit every poster - <em>"<strong>Headbutting Club</strong> members please assemble in the bins at Harper's Disco at 2300 sharp, please"</em> - to someone like me, who translated it into Middle Cornish and threw the original English away.<br /><br />There were also attempts to expel the Federation of Conservative Students. These porky date-rapists produced my favourite ever poster during the 1983 General Election: a picture of a <strong>British Army tank</strong> with the word <em>"Benn"</em> underneath it. Made me think.<br /><br />The Union printed a newspaper called <em>"Swansea Student"</em>, which sandwiched oddly prescient notices like <em>"This Union deplores the US bombing of Libya"</em> between music reviews copied from the NME and letters complaining about the Rugby Club's altruistic <em><strong>"bathe a lesbian"</strong></em> campaign.<br /><br />The most active political group were the <strong>Socialist Workers</strong> - a shrill of Kentish girls in cardies led by a future accountant who looked like Béla Bartók. She focused on berating a politics lecturer for failing to see the sexism inherent in Tom Paine's <em>"Rights of Man"</em>.<br /><br />The only campaign that had any coherence or momentum was anti-Apartheid, although this largely amounted to shouting <em>"Amandla!"</em> at <strong>confused West Indians</strong>, picketing showings of <em>"Zulu"</em> and frowning at the Rugby Club's <em>"Springboks"</em> fashion range.<br /><br />I have recounted one occasion when polishing a Silver Age college quip cost me dear in the <a href="http://alfanalf.blogspot.com/2008/11/agenbite-of-ffycwit.html">coinage of love</a>, and my sole contribution to anti-Apartheid at Swansea also dropped into the <strong>crusty sock of woe</strong>.<br /><br />Everyone read the <em>"Swansea Student"</em>, but I alone glanced at <em>"College News"</em>, the university administration's tedious and ill-set bulletin. It was even printed on bilious orange paper - the eternal colour of the loser, from <strong>70s porn actors </strong>to the Continuity Liberal Party (<a href="http://www.liberal.org.uk/">Meadowcroft Faction</a>).<br /><br /><em>"College News"</em> announced one day that our first principal, Professor Fulton, had died, and that in his honour College House would be renamed <strong>Fulton House</strong>. Sure enough, the following day the sign went up on the main administration building.<br /><br />The Student Union, which clung to the back of College/Fulton House like an amorous beetle, had voted to rename its drinking hole <em>"The Mandela Bar"</em> only the day before. This seemed appropriate enough, as it resembled the rumpus room of a <strong>condemned Congolese jailhouse </strong>with worse beer and less female company, but these were the 1980s and irony was only allowed on Radio 4.<br /><br />(It was later renamed after a series of children's TV characters and most recently Rob Brydon, before being sold to a Saudi engineering student as a garage for his <strong>gold-plated vacuum bed</strong>.)<br /><br />I was sipping a cloudy half of SA in <em>"The Mandela Bar"</em> that lunchtime with a group of Union activists, mainly because I was taken with the <strong>Women's Society secretary</strong>. This followed my lifelong pattern of being attracted to women who instinctively disapprove of me.<br /><br />Kay, despite the stripey tights, undyed cheesecloth drapes and <strong>general air of umbrage</strong> of her calling, liked having me around as I represented the native Welsh in her selection box of oppression. I was just happy for her braided hair to hover over my coal-streaked shoulder as she head-tilted to me about our Great Vowel Famine.<br /><br />Conversation turned to the question of <strong>College House</strong>. <em>"Who is this Fulton, anyway?"</em> asked Kay, with customary distrust at any college decision.<br /><br />Now, I could have told the truth and impressed the Union Executive with my ace reporting skills. Maybe Kay would have thought I was tapping into some mystical Celtic ley line of <strong>matriarchal knowledge</strong> about the soil and committee meeting rooms of my ancestors. I might even have drawn wry comparisons between the then principal's bookkeeper triteness and Professor Fulton's scholarly humility.<br /><br />Instead I glanced thoughtfully across at the poster of Mandela and mused <em>"Fulton? Isn't he the <strong>governor of Robben Island Prison</strong>?"</em><br /><br />It took a day or two and some urgent clarification before the pickets dispersed and the <strong>Cuban delegation</strong> found its way back to the docks, but Kay had firmly struck me off the list of Insulted and Injured.<br /><br />Student politics still follows the Boyo rules of instant irrelevance, in so far as the gowned masses can be roused from their rent-book torpor at all. Spengler and Gramsci would have picked up the gamey reek of decadence and nihilism in their chosen causes - The war in Iraq was <em>"Not in My Meme"</em>, and the <em>"We Are All Hezbollahas</em>" are indifferent to the bigots Medieval and modern who litter their rallies like <strong>trousers in a Whitehall farce</strong>.<br /><br />But then single-issue campaigns are the <strong>stripped-down chassis of politics</strong>, and inevitably attract the superficial. The Anti-Apartheid Movement, despite its occasional false starts, was a powerful motor of human progress. And it certainly had the best tunes. </div><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>When its official history is written I may try my luck again, assuming that Kay &amp; Co are now busy shipping kohl to Gaza, and submit my chapter on <em><strong>"The Fulton House Siege"</strong> </em>and its part in my downfall.</div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div></div>No Good Boyohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05859104068516964533noreply@blogger.com20